


And You Keep Coming Back To Me

by cacophonyGilded



Category: Terminator (Movies)
Genre: ...but there may be some implied robot sex, Carl Is Not A Sex Bot, Dealing With Trauma, Discussions of John Connor, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Grief, Major Character Undeath, Minor Body Horror, Minor Original Character(s), Past Carl/Alicia and Sarah/Kyle, Recovery, Slowburn Found Family Dynamic, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:20:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24178048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cacophonyGilded/pseuds/cacophonyGilded
Summary: The dust settles after the final battle. Dani and Sarah make it out alive.It's not good enough.
Relationships: Grace Harper/Dani Ramos, Sarah Connor & Dani Ramos, Sarah Connor/Carl (Terminator)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 58





	And You Keep Coming Back To Me

**Author's Note:**

> so, i guess this is me showing up to the dark fate party five months late with starbucks. anybody still here?

They stand in the wreckage.

After the unique high of an all-out brawl (though  _ brawl _ feels like far too inconsequential a word to describe what they’ve been through), the subsequent crash nearly knocks Dani unconscious. To ward off fatigue, she braces herself against some dilapidated piece of machinery, and after a few deep breaths, she is able to keep moving. Already, it feels as if she has spent too much of her life on the ground.

Dani finds Sarah staring emotionlessly over the ledge, the one that Carl had taken the terminator—well, the  _ other _ terminator—down. A rancid, burnt-metal smell wafts back up at them. Dani chokes on it. It smells like Grace had, at the very end. 

_ Grace. _

Dani’s knees wobble again, and she has to take a step back from the brink. 

“He’s not dead,” Sarah says matter-of-factly. A rush of adrenaline spikes back into Dani’s system and she clenches her fists, scanning the room for some improbable upper hand even as her mental and physical exhaustion scream the extent to which she truly  _ cannot _ endure another fight.

_ “What?” _

It takes her another second to realize that Sarah hadn’t been referring to the juggernaut that had pursued her, but rather the one who’d come to her aid. Sarah’s terminator. Carl.

The panic fades to doubt, but she doesn’t voice it. Dani knows that there’s something terribly broken inside Sarah Connor, something that it may be too late to fix. She’s been able to bury it deep, Dani thinks—for how could she still be moving if she hadn’t?—but now that the work is over, Dani has to wonder if it was truly deep enough. Carl said he’d sent her those notifications to give her a sense of purpose.

What’s Sarah’s purpose now?

Dani had seen something like sadness, even grief, flicker over the old woman’s face in the immediate aftermath of the battle, when the red light in Carl’s eye had finally faded to black. Whatever had been there once is gone now, though. Sarah has replaced it with a look of grim determination, her voice laced with very terse denial. In the hotel room, Sarah had told Dani that goodbyes would do her no good. Now, Dani wonders how to tell Sarah that it’s okay to say them.

She wonders if the other her, the Dani Ramos whom Grace had known, was stuck like Sarah: a perpetual motion machine out of sheer necessity, because if she stopped, lost her purpose, or was stuck with her loss, she would collapse. Dani feels the loss of her father and of Diego like the loss of a limb, but she’s not sure she can see herself in Sarah’s place. Not yet, anyway. She hasn’t been through hell as many times as her predecessor.

“They can’t self-terminate. I learned that from another one like him,” Sarah explains, calm. “A terminator couldn’t do a  _ heroic sacrifice _ on its own if it wanted to.”

Dani snaps out of her trance state and studies Sarah’s face for some crack in her facade, some signal that this is a symptom of what she’s been through and not an apparently rational line of thought from a seasoned veteran of near-miss apocalypses. Sarah knows more than Dani feels she could ever hope to learn about all this… terminator business, but she’s also proven vulnerable to fallacy; she’s so focused on her objective that she won’t stop to consider the details.

Part of Dani wants to reach out a hand to put on Sarah’s shoulder, but she isn’t sure it would be well received.

“But he didn’t terminate himself, did he?” Dani asks, her voice cautious. “He was killed by the… the one that was after me.”

Sarah refuses to even entertain the thought; she’s locked onto a plan now, and plans are good. She shakes her head.

“No. One of them made me lower him into lava once, because his  _ programming _ wouldn’t let him jump. Even though the act of jumping wouldn’t kill him, the fall would, get it? If going down there would kill him, he couldn’t have done it.”

“So?”

“So he’ll be back.” Sarah turns around with pursed lips, making Dani feel as if she is on the receiving end to a very obvious answer. The two women consider each other for a moment before Sarah seems to lose interest and turns her attention back to the bottom of the pit, where there are no signs of life or movement. She waits around half a minute before finally pushing up her sleeves.

“I’m going down there.”

Alarm bells ring in Dani’s head. “What? No, you can’t!”

“And why the hell would that be, general?”

“The other terminator’s still down there,” Dani offers lamely. “And you said Carl weighed 400 pounds. Even if you made it down, you wouldn’t be able to get him back up again.”

A flash of irritation across Sarah’s features, then a softening. She pats Dani’s cheek just a little too hard, like she wants to offer comfort but hasn’t touched another human being gently in a long, long time.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, sunshine. I’ll set up my pulley. Your work here is done. Go… go do what you need to do with Grace.”

It’s about as much comfort as Sarah Connor is prepared or able to offer, and Dani recognizes that. She’s grateful for it, in a way. She’s glad that Sarah’s still around, glad that, no matter how coarse and rough the woman may be, she’s not being left to deal with this on her own. Taking what she can get, Dani nods in deference to Mother Mary, and then she turns and walks away.

Kneeling by the corpse of a woman who’d loved her, Dani finally lets herself do what Sarah Connor hasn’t done since the day her son died: she cries.

It helps.

Not once in the process of jerry-rigging a pulley out of industrial cables pulled from God knows where and subsequently climbing down it, attaching the cables like a sling to the charred body of a burnt out T-800, climbing back up the way she came, and then using her very last dregs of already waning strength to hoist the damn thing up to the surface level does Sarah stop to consider why, exactly, she’s doing what she’s doing. As Dani had deduced, Sarah doesn’t allow herself much introspection; she's a Lot's Wife for the 20th century, and she'll crumble if she stops moving long enough to look back.

_ Don’t go there, _ her mind warns when she tries to recall the past for anything beyond the stark facts of the events she’s been through. Sarah’s no good at emotions. Better if she has none.

The terminator’s frame is still smoldering by the time she throws her shoulder back out of place dragging it up. She examines the parts and deems them “salvageable”; Sarah’s no expert on engineering, has never dug any further into the realm of technology than when she learned how best to destroy it and drop her phone in a bag of potato chips at the same time, but she needs the thing to be fixable and so, she decides, it is. If asked why “Carl’s” continued existence means so much to her, she would probably reply that she has yet to get the catharsis of killing him herself.

On every level but the most basic, she knows this isn’t true, but that’s okay; the most basic is the only level Sarah’s capable of operating on right now.

After pulling Carl’s junk metal body from the wreckage below, Sarah stares at it for only a second before marching on to the next task. This one, she can tell, isn’t going to be pleasant.

She needs to pull all the moving parts out of Grace’s own pile of rubble. Privately, Sarah had sent Dani over to the body so that she would be easier to placate when it was time. Oh, she’d wanted the kid to have some kind of closure if she could get it, of course, but Sarah is a veteran, and she knows better than anyone that closure isn’t real. She’s never gotten it, anyway. Every time she killed a new terminator, every life she potentially saved or bad timeline she potentially doomed, Sarah had thought,  _ maybe that will be enough. _ That perhaps she could finally rest. The next morning, waking with the ache of battle compounded on the ache of her years, she would find that it wasn’t so. An itch inside her would grow, and continue growing, until her phone dinged with another notification and she was off with purpose yet again.

Sarah hates how right the bastard had been about her, but she needs his sensors more.

To fix them, she’s got a bad idea of what she’s going to have to do next.

“You alright?” Sarah asks, squatting beside Dani and averting her eyes when she interrupts some private moment she doesn’t have the emotional tools to defuse. She feels Dani’s eyes on her, consumed by a melancholy Sarah has come to regard as weakness but steady in a way that challenges this perception. Strong. Sarah’s got no fucking clue how this girl came to be so strong, but she supposes that some people are just born like that. John was.

The thought makes Sarah’s mouth tighten into a line and strengthens her resolve to do this next. She starts rummaging through the toolkit she’d commandeered, tinkering with the best way to dig one hundred pounds of futuristic technology out of a corpse because she’s prepared to use a girl who had been alive not even two hours ago for scrap metal.

It’s a practical choice, she tells herself. Practicality is the glue that holds Sarah’s current life, such as it is, in one piece.

“No,” Dani answers at last. “But I will be. This Grace—the one who came back, if we change the future, she never has to die, right?”

Part of Sarah is surprised at how quickly Dani is catching on to all of this. She says nothing to this effect, just raises her eyebrows and nods.

“Then I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay as soon as the men who are supposed to make that future are damned to  _ hell _ where they belong.”

Dani takes one last look at Grace, her hand on the cyborg’s cheek, and then stands, brushing dirt off her pants and not looking back. Inwardly, Sarah whistles her appreciation. This girl has a plan. Sarah can work with a plan.

She’s coming dangerously close to liking Dani Ramos.

“Good work, soldier.”

Dani smiles in response, but it’s a tired smile. “Can you help me get her body out of here? I don’t think I can lift her by myself.”

Right. Here comes the part that Dani’s going to hate.

“I’m about to make it easier for you.”

A furrowed brow. “How?”

“I need to take all the cybernetics out of her.”

Sarah’s tone brokers no argument, because she’s not in the mood to deal with one. Even so, an instant coolness comes over Dani’s features; something like distrust. Goddamn sentimentalists.

“You’re going to cut her up for parts? She is a  _ human being.” _

“She was,” Sarah says, “but now she’s a corpse, and as a corpse, she’s not doing anyone any good. If we burn all those pieces your resistance will give her 20 years from now, they’ll go to waste, but in our time, there’s still some use in them.” She hesitates. “I could use them.”

Dani’s face is halfway between tired and angry. She’s got no energy for a fight, but she must feel she owes it to Grace to put one up, because she snaps, “For what?”

Sarah’s eyes dart meaningfully to the charred form of the terminator she had so painstakingly raised from Tartarus. She knows that Dani isn’t going to like that answer, but she’s not in the business of doing much to honor other people’s  _ feelings. _ Better to save what lives she can, and know that any ungratefulness she may face stems only from ignorance.

To keep saving lives, she needs that terminator.

Surprisingly, Dani doesn’t fight her much past that. She studies Sarah for a second, lips pursed, face sad, but finally she just nods, once, and starts to walk away.

“Do what you have to do,” she says. “I’m going to find us a way out of here.”

By the time Dani comes back with a truck that she’d graciously, as Sarah would say, “commandeered,” Sarah is surrounded by a pile of slightly bloody junk metal and has wrapped Grace’s remains unceremoniously in a tarp. She’d done as careful a job as she could with the autopsy, but underneath the cover, Grace’s chest (which had been almost entirely supported by her metal ribcage) is still noticeably sunken, grotesque. Dani has to look away.

The two women say nothing as they carry the stuff to the car, Sarah with an armful of parts, Dani struggling under the remaining heft of Grace’s frame. She’s much lighter now than she had been when Dani helped her into the drugstore back in Mexico City, but even given how sick she was then, Grace had still been there to support herself on augmented legs. Now she’s nothing but dead weight, and it hurts Dani to think of her like that, but she looks at Sarah and decides that it’s better than not thinking of her at all.

They work quickly.

When Grace is loaded in the back, Dani hops into the shotgun seat while Sarah carefully reverses the truck until it’s sitting parallel to her makeshift pulley system, climbs back out of the vehicle, and retrieves the busted husk of Carl’s body.

“Come with me if you want to operate,” Sarah scoffs. 

A second later, she clambers back in herself, and they’re off. Pulling away from the factory, Dani and Sarah communicate just enough to figure out vague directions. The rest of the night is spent alternating shifts between driving and keeping watch, neither of them able to sleep for how tired they are. Only as the sun starts to rise, their position safely secured in “the middle of buttfuck nowhere,” does Sarah finally pull off the road into a ditch and pass out in her seat without so much as lying down horizontally.

Not as experienced in sleeping on the move, it takes Dani a minute to make herself comfortable enough to relax here, but only a minute. At a certain point, exhaustion outweighs comfort and drags you down regardless.

When Dani wakes in the late afternoon, Sarah is behind the wheel again, and they’ve crossed two state lines.

That was weeks ago now. As the days go on, Dani waits with uneasy anticipation for the moment when Sarah decides to drop her encumbrance and part ways, leaving Dani out to dry in the wrong country with no papers, no way home, and no home to go to even if she could. Increasingly, though, it becomes clear that the day isn’t coming. Sarah, like Dani, has nowhere else to go, no one else to run to. Honestly, it seems like Sarah’s even more displaced than she is sometimes; Dani lost her father and brother, but there are still aunts and uncles, cousins, friends she could go back to if her life weren’t so crazy. Sarah doesn’t have that anymore, if she ever did; all she has left in the entire world is her crusade against judgement day.

Dani would pity her, if Sarah Connor were the kind of woman who allowed herself to be pitied. Given that she isn’t, though, given that she seems to think she’s burnt away all of her soft emotions and  _ weaknesses _ and left only a husk of nails to retreat behind, Dani simply shows respect by helping her when she asks and setting about preparing for what comes next.

At Dani’s request, they track down Grace in the present day, a version of Grace who, if they have anything to say about it, will never travel through time. Watching from just beyond Grace’s line of sight, Dani feels her heart ache in her chest, and makes a vow not to let her die in Dani’s name again.

She knows that Sarah is only humoring her in coming here, that she’s too tough or too weak for closure and goodbyes, but appreciates that the woman never comments on how they’re wasting time by making the trip. She simply stands by while Dani reassures herself that while the Grace she’d met (known,  _ loved?) _ may be dead, this Grace is still alive and well, and then pulls herself into the passenger’s seat when Dani is done and continues on.

They burn Grace’s body with the tarp, deep in some woods they scavenge through in New England. After that, they just keep going, no particular destination in mind but away, keeping a close ear held to the news radio, listening for strange anomalies or, more practically, warrants for their arrest.

After two weeks on the lam, they hear Sarah Connor pronounced dead in the attack on the border control detention center they’d escaped from. The name Dani Ramos never comes up; apparently, the US government sees no value in the life of one more illegal immigrant gone missing in custody.

They breathe easier after that, but not much.

When they aren’t driving, Sarah and Dani prepare for the unpreparable. Dani starts joining Sarah on morning workouts and spends a month sore in muscles she didn’t even know she had. She learns about guns and weapons and where to get them in a pinch. When the pullups start getting easier, when Dani is planting her feet for target practice correctly without even thinking about it, the progression doesn't even occur to her. It’s just how things should be.

At night, Sarah works on Carl. Sometimes Dani will wake at three, four a.m. and catch the light on across their shared motel room: a penlight clutched in Sarah’s teeth while she jerks a wrench around and swears. During these times, Dani wants to reach out to her with a blanket, tell her that he’s gone and she can’t fix him, and lead Sarah back to bed.

Yeah, like that would go over well.

Instead, Dani shakes her head, turns herself over, and sleeps. Sometimes, she dreams about Grace.

Sometimes, she doesn’t dream at all.

This pattern in their lives continues nearly comfortably for an imprecise stretch of time—somewhere between one month and five, if Dani had to hazard a guess. During this period, Dani starts to think that she’s going to occasionally wake to Sarah’s futile efforts toward bringing back a broken machine for the rest of her life, and it becomes nearly normal to hear scraping metal sounds when she should be hearing the woman’s loud, unabashed snores. They start to plan an attack on an Amazon building at Sarah’s insistence, and Dani is beginning to see how she could do this, if not forever, then for at least as long as Sarah needs her, when one day, a very strange thing happens.

On the other side of the room in a shitty Super 8 somewhere on the border of Billings, Montana, Sarah’s terminator opens its eyes.

“Sarah Connor,” he says, diving treacherously into the uncanny valley as he speaks without emoting or even moving his skeletal face. Dani knows better than to risk drawing attention to them by calling out, but she can’t help a sharp intake of breath. Unlike Sarah, whose conviction in her own ultimate success had been unwavering, Dani had not honestly expected to hear that voice ever again.

Sarah stands at the ready, hefting a fairly large rocket launcher that, if fired, will render Dani’s precaution in holding her scream completely unnecessary. She aims it stoically at the twisted metal she had been working so diligently to resurrect.

“Is this the part where you say you’ve been sent from the future to kill me?” 

“I was not sent to kill you. I was sent to kill your son. Additionally, if I were going to kill you now, I would not tell you so. I would just do it.”

The terminator’s voice is more tinny than before, less human; it’s a product of Sarah’s replacement of his damaged voice modulator with a speaker ripped from an iPhone. Strangely, he still retains the accent.

Sarah doesn’t put down the gun. 

“Why don’t you tell me what you remember, then.”

“Sarah, it’s Carl. What are you—?”

Sarah cuts a quick warning glance up to Dani before locking her eyes back down on the machine. Her face betrays nothing.

“Listen. He took on a whole lot of damage back at that dam, and we’ve got no idea how much it’s affected his memory. All he’s told us so far is that he was sent to kill my son. Does that make you trust him?”

Dani looks at Sarah for a moment, then hardens her heart and levels a gaze nearly as steely as Sarah’s at the body of her erstwhile protector.

“No.” Without taking her eyes off of Carl, Dani’s hand inches for the nearest weapon.

“Talk,” Sarah barks.

“I was sent back in time by SkyNet to terminate John Connor. I completed my mission in Guatemala, and became stuck in the year 1998 with no further orders. For a few months, I was without purpose, until I met my wife Alicia and came into her life to protect her and her son. We moved to America so they could have a better life, and to escape from the men I angered by protecting them. I began to search for a job to support them, but was rejected many times. It was very frustrating. I am far stronger and more intelligent than a human being. Finally I was hired by a drapery business. They were impressed by my uncanny eye for design. My first job, I helped a couple pick out red drapes for the windows in their first apartment. It saved their marriage; the path they were on with their gingham plaid was doomed to failure. My second job—”

“You can skip the parts about the fucking drapes, Carl.”

If it’s possible for the burnt out husk skeleton of an emotionless computer to look hurt, Carl does a remarkable job of it. He stares blankly at Sarah through red-lighted eyes for one tense beat, then continues.

“I find the drapes to be an integral part of my personal journey.”

Sarah wonders if it’s too late to let the Rev-9 put her out of her misery after all. Lowering the sunglasses perched on her nose with one hand, she makes a face that she hopes will speak to the depths of her unamusement. Even with an opponent physically incapable of feeling the weight of her heavy gaze, she is not prepared to crack first. 

“I don’t.”

They stare at each other for another indeterminate stretch of time before Carl finally continues.

“Very well. I lived for many happy years with my family in Texas. I helped Alicia adjust to life in the United States and assisted Matteo with his homework. This is when I began to learn what it was like to care for humans. If it weren’t for them, I would have wandered the Earth until my biological parts began to fall off and expose the rest of me to the world. In learning what they meant to me, I realized what I had taken from you, Sarah. I decided to look into your life, and found that you were very sad. You were doing just what I would have been: wandering the Earth. I felt an approximation of pity for you.”

“Hey, metalhead, I didn’t ask for your observations,” Sarah says, unusually embarrassed by the way this fucking jackass had read her like a book. “Just walk me through what you remember.”

“It was around then that I began to feel terminators being sent back in time from a faction that was not SkyNet. The events that would be their undoing had only just been set in motion, but their first attempts were sloppy. They were easy to destroy. That is why I sent you after them.”

She smiles insincerely at him, entertaining a brief fantasy that this machine may have an off switch.

“But as they increased in frequency, your skills in hunting these terminators improved immensely. I took this as a sign that you had discovered your purpose, as I had. From then on, I thought you might be able to handle all the attacks, and I grew hopeful that I could spend the rest of my battery life protecting my family. That was not to be. A Rev-9 model terminator was sent back in time to kill Daniella Ramos, and—”

“Yeah, we were there for that part, asshole,” Sarah drops her gun so its sights are no longer trained on Carl, but does not put it down entirely. “So you remember it all?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Now, I have just one more question for you—”

“I have a question for you, Sarah.”

“Tough,” she says, lifting the rocket launcher to her shoulder all over again. With every fiber of her being, she wants this to be the part where she asks  _ “do you feel lucky?” _ and blows the motherfucker sky high, attempts at reparations be damned because when she told him back at his house that she would kill him when it was over, she meant it, but now she has pictures of this terminator being a better, more stable parent than she was running through her head (although in all fairness, it’s probably easier to be stable when you’re the monster under the bed and not the one desperately running from it), and what she does ask, in a moment more vulnerable than she’s allowed herself since John, is, “Would you do it again?”

The joints Sarah fashioned for Carl’s piecemeal skeleton are not exactly calibrated for fine motor functions, but he nevertheless manages to tilt his head quizzically in what is more or less Sarah’s direction.

“I do not understand.”

Sarah’s grip on her gun, to her horror, begins to shake, and for the first time in twenty-two years, she feels tears prick in the corners of her eyes. Thankful for the sunglasses, she squeezes those eyes shut furiously (not that it probably stops Carl from seeing her weakness, the bastard) and shifts her weight as to support the gun without faltering.

“You think you learned so much. You think you’ve  _ changed.” _ Sarah almost spits the word, but deep down, she thinks her disgust may not be for the proper target. “But have you? Or is all this great philosophical bullshit only possible because you carried out your mission?”

"Sarah...," Dani tries.

“Well?” she snarls, a lone tear streaking down her face to slip down her chin. “If you went back right now and had the same orders to take my boy from me,  _ would you do it again?” _

Half of her actually wants him to say he would, because she knows it’ll be the final kick she needs to revert this asshole to parts. The other half of her, the clearer half, knows that it’s not what John would have wanted. He had, after all, been the one to stand between her and the other terminator. Like he had then, John would believe in the lesson that Carl claims to have learned.

It hurts her beyond words to remember that, to consider what John would want. The uglier parts of Sarah Connor yearn to make someone else hurt the way she has.

Carl does not take the raw, semi-irrational pain that boils on Sarah’s face into account when he formulates his response. It is not in a terminator’s nature to be cautious; though his continued existence literally depends on his tactful answer to Sarah’s question, Carl just plows on with as little nuance as he ever had. Naked and painful and blunt as it is, he tells the truth. There is nothing else but that.

“When I traveled back to 1998, I could conceive of nothing except my orders. Our programming is such that it is very difficult to question, or rebel. However, when I cared for Alicia and Matteo, I pushed against those orders every day. A terminator knows nothing about protection. I do.

“Terminating John, I knew him only as the enemy, and as a target. By the time I learned what I had taken from you, I realized that he was not yet the leader of the resistance against SkyNet. He was only a child, much like the boy I had been protecting. Since that day, my ability to challenge the fundamentals of my programming has strengthened considerably. Today, given the order I was given then, I would not kill John Connor. If I could give him back to you, I would.”

“But you can’t.” Sarah meant for her reply to come out scathing, her face twisted into a disgusted visage, but her voice cracks on the last word, and she feels more exposed and uncomfortable than she’s ever been.

“No,” he agrees in that same tinny monotone. “So I understand why you must terminate me. I am ready.”

Sarah’s face takes on a sickly but determined pallor. She straightens her aim on the rocket launcher one last time, but even as she goes through the motions of training her sights on Carl with a numb and mechanical ease, she knows she’s only doing it because clinging to the illusion that she might follow through is easier than admitting that she’s already made the decision to let her son’s killer walk free; her conviction no longer supports the action.

“Killing you won’t bring him back,” Sarah says wearily.

Another set of tears streak down Sarah’s face (and fuck the floodgates for choosing this particular moment to open up, when she had spent so many years wanting to grieve properly and finding herself incapable) as she unshoulders the gun and drops it unceremoniously onto the bed. A sigh of relief sounds in the room—as one, Sarah and Carl turn to see Dani, still holding her gun, looking anxiously at Sarah for confirmation of the “all clear”. Sarah nods, finding once again that there’s something she greatly appreciates built deep into Dani Ramos.

“Sorry for waking you, kiddo. Get some sleep.”

Dani resets the safety and carefully places the gun on her nightstand. Tentatively, she smiles as she slips back under her covers, the tension in her shoulders finally starting to dissipate. 

“It’s nice to have you back, Carl.”

“Thank you.”

Disarming her own weapon, Sarah spares hardly a glance back at the machine before untucking all the blankets on her bed in one swift tug and moving to climb in, jeans and all. As if in afterthought, she shucks off the top sheet and throws it carelessly in the general direction of the terminator.

“Put that over your head,” she orders, military persona slipping with some relief over the very raw Sarah Connor underneath it all. “You look like shit.”

Without objecting, Carl does as he’s told.

It is with no small wonder that a sense of gentle contentment is allowed to settle over the room. Tactical concerns alleviated, Sarah at last acknowledges the very persistent truth of her exhaustion and surrenders herself to it completely, letting sleep push away anxieties about the apocalypse, sorrows from her past, and the ever-present twinge for alcohol she starts to feel when confronted with either one. Her work is far from over, but Sarah has accomplished this one impossible thing, so tonight she allows herself to just  _ be, _ as they all are: the savior of the human race, tangled in blankets and drooling on her arm, Mother Mary, snoring offensively and decked out in her bulletproof vest instead of pajamas, and a metal-framed holy sheet ghost, returned from the dead and settling himself in for his night of vigil. For the first time since Sarah was dragged to a breakroom TV set reporting her own name among the dead, she starts to feel like everything’s going to end up okay.

A week and a half after Sarah’s reckless optimism pays off for her, she pulls Dani aside and strikes flint into her soul’s dry kindling, setting off dangerous sparks of hope that blaze all too quickly into a full inferno that threatens to burn Dani alive.

She gives her a chip of carefully preserved hardware and starts to walk away without saying a word. Dani pulls her back, clutching at the older woman’s forearm and trying to control her breathing.

“What is this?” 

The words catch in her throat. Dani hardly lets herself consider what the chip  _ may _ be, because she knows where her mind will go if she lets it, and she also knows just how much it will hurt when she’s wrong.

Before now, Dani has never seen Sarah’s expression flecked with shame—hesitance, reluctance, perhaps even embarrassment, rarely, but never shame—so it comes as somewhat of a surprise when she averts her eyes at the question. The recovery is quick, in true Sarah fashion, but there’s a slightly defensive edge to her voice even after the walls go up, and she can’t quite seem to meet Dani’s eyes; the giddy, uncertain truth is not yet out between them, but Dani already knows that her original intuition had been correct. It’s about Grace.

“I found it when I was salvaging her parts,” Sarah says, nodding to the chip in Dani’s hand. “Look, before I go any further, I don’t want you to get your hopes up about this.”

In spite of the warning, or maybe because of it, Dani’s heart leaps to her throat. She can hardly keep her voice steady when she asks again, “What  _ is _ it, Sarah?”

Sarah drops her fidgeting and her pretenses—she’s the proud owner of about as much tact as Carl, and that’s on her better days. Looking at Dani now, she raises her eyebrows.

“It’s her brain.”

_ “What?” _ Dani’s heart races at the implications, the possibilities. How is this even possible—Grace had been human, hadn’t she? And what does it mean?

Could this be a way to regain some of what she has lost?

Dani knows things will never go back to the way they were before. Though she refuses to forget them (and fuck what Sarah may say about vulnerability), she can’t pretend not to understand that her father and Diego are gone. Forever. Things are never going to be the same, and deep down, Dani isn’t actually sure she  _ wants _ them to be; she may be on the lam now, a desperate fugitive, but even this must be preferable to putting in endless hours at a factory owned by some American asshole, only to be inevitably replaced by a piece of shit machine with no heart. 

Reflecting on the events that brought her here, the thought makes Dani snort. Still, this… Dani can’t help but feel brilliant hope flaring to life inside of her, that this chip she’s got cradled so delicately in her palm may be the key to a reunion with one those people she had lost too soon. It’s a dangerous notion. This was what Sarah had been warning her against when she had cautioned against raised hopes. Still, Dani can’t bear to fully extinguish this flame she’s fanning. Sarah’s blind belief in an impossible resurrection had paid off, hadn’t it? Faith is all they’re running on now, and they need as much as they can get.

“I had my suspicions when I found it at the base of her skull, but I needed Carl to confirm it for me. Didn’t want to tell you before I was sure.”

“But… but  _ how?” _ Dani doesn’t want to look a gift horse in the magical chip of resurrection, but she still can’t wrap her mind around exactly what this thing in her hand  _ is. _ “She was a human.”

“Augmented with more complex technology than a terminator,” Sarah amends. “This chip may not contain her soul, but it’s got a record of all her memories, mannerisms, the basic skeleton of her personality. Carl thinks you could use it to make some sort of Grace-bot, because  _ more _ high-tech robotics are exactly what we need to be bringing into the world right now.”

Sarah rolls her eyes to accompany this jab, but her face is otherwise completely guarded, unreadable. Dani can’t tell if Sarah wants to protect her from the pain of glimpsing some perfect happy ending that will never come to pass (a subject that Dani supposes Sarah must know a thing or two about) or if she has reservations for some other, private reason, but she decides to leave the woman to her secrets for now.

There are a million other questions Dani’s burning to ask, only a fraction of which, she suspects, Sarah may be equipped to answer, but anger spikes in her mind and she comes first to the most pressing one:

“And you tell me this  _ now?” _

Dani and Sarah stand a block away from a major software company’s R&D building, surrounded by pipe bombs in an open air Jeep. Dani had spent the morning making peace with the notion that this endeavor might end in her arrest or worse; before they left the hotel, Carl had analyzed the best strategic hits to the building’s structure to ensure its total collapse in as little time as possible following evacuation. This is not an ideal time to be confronted with the idea that Dani may once again have something to lose.

Sarah seems to understand this, but acknowledges it only by smirking and walking away, toting a bag on her shoulder that Dani knows is filled to the brim with explosives.

Without looking back, Sarah calls, “I had to make sure you had a reason to get out of there alive.”

Dani stands frozen for a full second, unable to do anything but gape in simultaneous awe and abject fury that this one woman has the capacity to be so uniquely testing. Grace’s voice runs through her mind unbidden—“If you’re Mother Mary, how come I so wanna beat the shit out of you?”—and Dani is pleasantly surprised to find that the memory brings a smile to her lips. For a second, she is calm. 

Shaking herself out of all these thoughts best saved for the aftermath of whatever it is that they’re about to go do, Dani zips the chip securely into a hidden pocket under her shirt  _ (close to her heart), _ and then grabs her own bag of pipe bombs and hurries after Sarah in a huff.

“Hey, Carl, tell me something. You got any instructions on how to regrow your human suit stored up in that big brain of yours?” 

“I am moderately familiar with the process.”

“Huh. And how high are the odds that, if I helped you go through with something like that, I would be indirectly at fault for inventing the process that goes into making you fuckers in the future?”

“Very high.”

“Great. What if I promise to be  _ real _ careful and not record any of the steps we take?”

“In that case, I would say… 50/50.”

“Fuck it, I’m sick of looking at your ugly metal mug. That’s good enough for me.”

“There are over ten thousand facilities worldwide with the level of technological development theoretically required to spawn the Legion supercomputer. Many of these are heavily guarded and under government surveillance. The odds of this plan being successful are pretty much zero.”

Sarah groans and tilts her head back to look at the ceiling.

“God damn it, I didn’t bring you back from the dead to give me lip. Your job is to tell me where I should aim my guns, and then step back and let me go to work.”

Dani drops her head heavily onto crossed arms. They’re in another motel in another state, and she’s been listening to this argument (a new arrangement of the  _ same _ argument she’s been listening to for the last  _ four or five _ states) for over an hour; the success of their first strike on a possible Legion hotzone had emboldened Sarah to consider greater scale tactics, but she and Carl can’t seem to make up their minds on where exactly these drastic measures will be best directed. Dani, for her part, still believes that their first attack going off without a hitch had been entirely down to luck, and she has been very clear that she wants no part in a second until they’re certain it will alter the outcome of humanity’s future. Thus far, she has been given no such assurances, and she’s not exactly holding her breath for them, either.

“The entity with the highest probability of creating a program such as Legion or SkyNet is the United States government. However, leveling an attack on the Pentagon with your current skillset and weaponry would be suicide.”

“Thanks for your input, I didn’t ask.”

“Additionally, the possibility that a terrorist attack on a high level governmental building would incite that government to look more seriously into a nuclear defence program like SkyNet is high. All around, it is a bad plan. Don’t do it.”

Finally relinquishing her aspirations toward an  _ America’s Most Wanted _ double feature, Sarah runs one hand through her gray hair and curses.

“Well, aren’t you Mr. Sunshine and Buttercups this morning.”

“Yes.”

As Sarah turns back to her pages upon pages of encrypted notes, grumbling as she tries to switch gears onto a new plan for terminating Legion or SkyNet or whatever the hell else is coming from the future to ruin her morning, Dani wonders if being stuck between these two is some sort of cosmic punishment for complaining about her father’s stubbornness. He  _ had _ been stubborn, she reflects, particularly after her mother passed, but she could always cajole him into taking care of himself or doing work around the house with an effort. Now, Dani is stuck living with an unstoppable, single-minded machine made for one purpose and one purpose only, never stopping to rest until that purpose is fulfilled and completely oblivious to any directive which does not further it.

Oh yeah, and Carl’s here, too.

Thinking about her father makes Dani go a little teary eyed, but the memory of his hard head makes her smile. That’s how most memories of home feel these days: bittersweet, melancholy, golden plated. Painful, but accessible. Still, she knows there’s a time and a place. 

Dani shakes her head and decides that she’s allowed herself more than enough time for dwelling on maudlin remembrances. She tucks them away for now. Her father, after all, had always praised her for living in the moment.

The past month may not have seen much groundwork re: Sarah’s quest to dismantle Legion’s base by its individual lines of code, but it has been productive in other ways. One of Sarah’s contacts came through on a generous new supply of ammunition for their various weapon stockpiles, which may be good news even if her “nuke ‘em all” approach doesn’t pan out long term. Radio silence regarding any lingering warrants for their arrest has given them a little more leeway in their traveling habits. Perhaps the most noticeable change of all is Sarah’s obvious success in her effort to grow Carl his face back… or at least, the obvious progress toward that goal. The stuff they had DIY bioengineered into existence to produce human-ish skin and muscle grows quickly, but not quickly enough. As it stands, Carl has about half a face—the other half’s absence giving him quite the Phantom of the Opera look—a good portion of the muscles he’s supposed to have, and a steadily progressing cover of actual skin. According to him, the process won’t take more than another week now; according to Dani, he should’ve stuck to being a robot. Really, she understands that the exposure of this muscle tissue to the air isn’t as dangerous to him as it should be, given the junk’s regenerative and antibacterial properties (she still recoils at the memory of their disastrous first batch, which had begun to rot on his frame and prompted the motel manager to search for a dead animal in their walls after they left), but that doesn’t mean she wants to look at it. Particularly while eating. Yuck.

Sarah seems miraculously unaffected, but maybe that’s just Sarah.

Progress on Dani’s own pet project has been slow. She’s taken up Sarah’s midnight vigil, all those insomniatic hours tinkering with loose parts in hopes that she might blunder into making something that works, but they don’t even have the bits and pieces for so much as a true frame; some of what Sarah collected from Grace’s body, like her ribcage, had ended up going unused in her resurrection of Carl after the terminator’s parts proved mostly undamaged, but there had never been a full metal endoskeleton in Grace to begin with, and half of what  _ was _ there had since been repurposed. Carl has been invaluable help, to his credit, but they discover early on that the chip containing Grace’s “brain” is incompatible with SkyNet’s operating system. For the most part, Dani has been flying blind. She has no experience in engineering, no point of reference, and, because accessing the internet for information as specialized as all of this would give her away like a signal flare, no real plan of attack.

It’s frustrating, but she’s learning to move past that. When she hits a dead end, she just has to take a deep breath and try something else. Even if it’s her hundredth dead end. Or thousandth. 

Sometimes Dani thinks with no small level of despair that she’ll be telling herself the same thing when she hits her  _ millionth _ dead end. It doesn’t help that a big chunk of her time is being monopolized by Sarah’s schemes, either. 

In fact…

“I think you’re going about this all wrong.”

Voicing this thought she’s been sitting on for days sends a nervous thrill through Dani, but by the time it’s out all eyes are on her, and it’s too late to rescind the statement. Picking up speed with a confidence she still half-believes isn’t justified, Dani rushes on.

“It’s like he said; the chances are high that destroying some facility will only trigger the events we want to stop in the first place. Violence asks for  _ more violence. _ I know why you think this is the answer, Sarah, but don’t you understand that you can’t win every war with a kill box? Maybe this time, the way to take down Legion is to bring people together before it even forms.”

Sarah lets out a hard puff of air through her nose, muttering something that sounds suspiciously to Dani like “Jesus Christ, a pacifist.” She leans back further in her chair, kicking two booted feet up to rest carelessly on top of her papers. Across the table, Dani tilts her chin and holds her gaze. She’s long past feeling like the member out of the loop, and knows she’s more than earned her place at the big kids’ table. Sarah doesn’t—well, she still  _ does _ intimidate Dani, but she can’t silence her anymore.

“‘Can’t win every war with a kill box,’ huh? That’s not my experience. I hate to break it to you, but my way works, kid. SkyNet—”

“Was  _ your _ apocalypse, Sarah. Not mine.”

Dani is a little surprised by her own audacity, but understands the urgency of continuing while the unshakable Sarah Connor is still shocked into silence.

“And you had to have noticed by now that even after you took down SkyNet, humanity still got fucked by the future anyway. Rogue AI. Nuclear war. Boom. I know you want to take down Legion. I do, too! But maybe we need to do something different this time to keep that future away from us—for good.”

When the whole thing is said and done, Sarah still sits back in her chair, arms still crossed over her chest, eyes still on Dani’s face, but her eyebrows have shot up into the stratosphere, and her mouth is gaping just the slightest bit, and for the first time, Dani truly feels like she’s managed to impress the woman. It shouldn’t matter—Sarah isn’t her mother, or even remotely motherly—but she can’t deny that the idea of managing such a feat feels good.

After a second, Sarah uncrosses her arms and leans forward. Her movements are looser, less confrontational. It must be a day of firsts, because Dani could swear that Sarah is actually  _ conceding the argument. _

“Guess this is why they made you the leader of the resistance and I was just the leader’s  _ mom,” _ she says, half serious. “Well, then. You’re the boss. What do  _ you _ think our next move should be, Commander Dani?”

Damn it. Dani hasn’t really gotten this far—can’t even  _ begin _ to figure out how to launch some grassroots movement that will ultimately bring about the deescalation of nuclear war and create peace in a time that’s tumultuous even before the machines attack. How could she? When she puts it like that, in fact, it sounds like an impossible fantasy; a pipe dream. Her cheeks color with embarrassment as she hesitates, but ultimately, Dani has to admit it. 

“I don’t know.”

Sarah’s face falls a fraction of an inch and she spreads her hands in a “there you have it” gesture, but she doesn’t ridicule Dani or press the issue for the time being, a fact which Dani appreciates. All Sarah does is swing her boots back down to the floor and her attention to her papers, as if pouring over the same map for the hundredth time will show her something new.

“I agree with Dani,” Carl announces right as Dani finds herself on the brink of falling into her own head to wrestle with an impossible answer to a question without one. In the same beat, Sarah scoffs “you would,” and things revert to normal.

As she slips off to sleep that night, Dani is aware of the faint outlines of an idea forming in her mind, some vast and untouchable thing knitted from the tangled threads of uncertainty toward what, exactly, she  _ can _ do, and the unwavering certainty that she can do  _ more. _

Sarah would have to call cohabitating on a quasi-permanent basis for the first time in twenty years a “double-edged sword.” On one hand, the omnipresent threat that her lifestyle choices might be judged by an infant or, worse, a cyborg has compelled her to start caring for herself in a sense that goes beyond doing cardio and target practice in the morning until she can’t walk and then binge drinking all night until she can’t see, a process which she had previously perfected. Access to a diet beyond potato chips and Jack Daniels probably isn’t hurting her, either. On the other hand, without the hard edge of anxiety-induced insomnia or the sweet oblivion of whiskey-induced unconsciousness, Sarah’s now become sufficiently rested to produce  _ dreams. _

It’s enough to drive a woman crazy. 

Every day, she tells herself that things will be different, that today will be the day that she learns to extract herself from the horrors of her past through some good-old-fashioned power of will. Every  _ night, _ she wakes to vivid nightmares starring too many dead bodies: Ginger and Matt, the first two people she’d lost to this eternal nightmare she’s been living since her early twenties; Kyle Reese, dead in her arms while that thing was still after her; those children she used to see blasted apart by the nuclear apocalypse she once thought she was powerless to stop;  _ John. _ When she’s awake, Sarah can’t so much as remember John’s voice, his face, but her subconscious mind cheerfully dregs it all up no problem—all the good moments and all the bad, the bad ones intolerable and the good ones worse, because every time her mind replays them, they always end the same way. A terminator comes in and shoots him. She’s not fast enough. He dies.

Again and again and again, every fucking night. Her eyes are blinded by a flash of red light from the terminator’s gun. A skinless skeleton rises from the depths of a truck fire. A bisected machine reaches out for her, makes to choke her… a new model, liquid metal, gets a hole blown in it by a shotgun shell and heals right back up again. Every worst moment of Sarah’s life, coming back to her like a bad penny. 

And people wonder why she drinks.

It gets so bad that Sarah starts to weigh the merits of renting two motel rooms to avoid disturbing Dani with her tossing and turning in the night. It’s not exactly a practical solution, nor a permanent one (at this rate they’ll be draining their funds almost twice as fast), but it hides her problem, and that will make things bearable while she figures out how to get everything under control. Which she will.

Eventually.

About a week into this arrangement, Sarah lies in a strange and crusty bed somewhere in the regrettable state of Missouri and falls asleep gradually, reluctantly. Being alone in the room is both comforting and not; she left Carl to look after Dani, who had given Sarah an infuriatingly knowing glance when she announced that she would be retiring next door. For a while, she’s still.

A nightmare starts. Sarah’s hands twitch; she tosses her head from side to side unconsciously. She’s on the beach in Livingston, Guatemala, and her son is at the bar. She knows what’s coming. She cannot stop it.

In the dark of her single room, the clock showing nearly three in the morning, Sarah Connor sits bolt upright, screaming “NO!” and reaching for a gun that isn’t there before it hits her that she’s not where she thinks she is, and a round from her handgun will not rescue her dead.

She sits there panting for an indeterminate length of time, her hands on her forehead, willing back the tears in her eyes.

Damn her body for deigning to produce tears again after all this time. When she needed them, she was dry, and now that she’s got no use, she’s fighting them off almost daily, before she so much as eats her breakfast oatmeal. It’s useless, this deferred, undesirable grief. Sarah hates to consider what it reflects back on her.

When the emotions of the dream fade into the background noise of Sarah’s brain (noise that she’s grown oh so adept at blocking out), she flops backward, halfway propped up against the headboard, settling in for another sleepless night. For a second, she thinks she may even be able to doze, when—

_ Knock knock knock _

—a heavy hand raps methodically, three times in quick succession, on her door. 

There’s no big mystery as to who’s lurking beyond it. Sarah squeezes her eyes in contrived annoyance and futilely debates whether she really wants to let him in right now. Or ever. Ultimately, though, she knows he’ll never give up until she does. As much as she hates to admit it, Sarah knows that when you deal with terminators, you sometimes have to pick your battles. Rolling back her covers with a groan, Sarah decides to pass on this one.

“What the fuck do you want,” she asks Carl, her sunglasses sloppily pushed on over her eyes so he can’t see that she’s been crying. He stands impassively in the doorframe looking down on her, not reacting to the gun she’s got pulled and loaded, just in case. Taking him in, Sarah notes that the finished result of their bioengineering project has turned out remarkably; Carl looks nearly identical now to her first memory of him back in Laredo, all the way down to the facial hair that’s just started to grow back in and the deceptively human paunch around his midsection. The only difference is that this new skin suit is free of old scars. He had expressed some disappointment at that, perhaps discontent to lose the physical proof of his unique life and lived experiences, but in the end, there had been nothing they could do, and the scars had been lost to time.

“I came to check on you.”

Sarah acknowledges the solid-enough justification behind this decision and sneers anyway. She would have been next door in a microsecond if Dani had been the one to scream, but that doesn’t mean she has to be happy about this.

“I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on  _ Dani,” _ she says, as if he could have forgotten.

“She was the one who sent me. We heard a yell.”

“Well,” Sarah says, stepping back enough to allow an inspection and gesturing up and down with her hands. “I’m fine. You can go now.”

She tries to close the door, but he doesn’t move.

“Excuse me, computer boy, is your mainframe damaged? I said—”

“I thought you might like some company.”

The declaration is so far out of left field that Sarah drops her hand from the door in disbelief and involuntarily takes another step backward. Carl takes this as a cue to come inside, like the stupid, invasive bastard that he is.

“What in the goddamn hell would give you that idea?” Sarah asks once she can speak again. She has to spin from the door to face him, and is not amused by his intrusion in the least. If he knows that he’s unwelcome, Carl shows no sign of it.

“You have been having nightmares. The company of others is often beneficial to a more comfortable night’s sleep.”

“And you came instead of Dani, why?”

Carl blinks. “She was already in bed.”

Damn it. Recalling her earlier decision about battles and when to pick them, Sarah finally rolls her eyes and thumbs the safety on her gun, setting it gently within arm’s reach atop her bedside table while motioning at Carl to close and relock the door. That done, she climbs back underneath her sheets and waves over her shoulder at one corner of the room in a maneuver some might consider dangerously impassive, an obvious attempt to distract Carl while she curls into a ball on one side and tries valiantly to ignore the heavy melancholy already settling back over her weary bones.

“Fine. Go stand watch or whatever it is you do while we sleep. See if I care.”

Carl doesn’t move. From her new position, Sarah can see only his legs and part of his torso. She doesn’t necessarily hate what she sees there, which is annoying. It’s probably easier to stay fit at 60, she figures, when your skin and muscles are just a front for an ageless body made from a metal alloy underneath.

After a moment of silence wherein Sarah starts to fantasize that all the bullshit is finally over and he’s going to let her get back to her night of not sleeping, Carl speaks up again.

“I could sleep with you if you wanted me to.”

Sarah nearly falls out of bed.

_ “Excuse _ me?”

“Nightmares can be soothed by physical contact. When Matteo was an infant, I often cradled him in my arms to help him sleep. I could do the same for you.”

“So what you’re offering is… to hold me in your arms. Like a baby.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck. No.” Sarah shoots him a look that could freeze hell, and with that, turns over and wills herself to sleep. Perhaps out of her intense need to spite Carl for his absurd offer, she makes it to a state of unconsciousness quicker than she has (unaided, at least) in years, and for half an hour or so, she even manages to keep that sleep spitefully peaceful.

Approximately one hour and three minutes after falling into a deceptively passive state, however, Sarah jerks awake again, managing to strangle her shout this time but unable to do anything about the tears in her eyes. When she looks around, grounding herself in the present, in reality, reminding herself where she is and that she’s okay, relatively, and safe, kind of, she spots Carl, standing in the same place he had been when she’d managed to doze. He looks at her, saying nothing, waiting for her to acknowledge what just happened. She doesn’t want to.

“Just come here,” Sarah says at last, pulling the cover back and averting her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at Carl looking at her, doesn’t have to acknowledge what she’s about to do and who she’s about to do it with. He sits down beside her and the bed dips. They’re hardly touching, but the heat of his skin is maddeningly comforting to Sarah already. She’s been touch starved for so long she hardly remembers what contact like this feels like. She tries to relax, and he moves to put an arm around her.

“Hold it, fatass,” she says, spine going rigid again. “Did you forget the part where you weigh  _ four hundred pounds?" _

He stops moving obediently. 

“Perhaps it would be more comfortable for you if you were on top of me.”

Sarah snorts. “Not the first time a man’s said that to me, but probably the weirdest. Oh, what the hell.”

Very reluctantly, Sarah turns on her side and curls her arms around Carl, one leg thrown over his own for good measure. She can’t remember a single time in her life that she slept with someone this intimately—no time with Kyle, no inclination with any of the douchebags she kept around after him because of how, one way or another, they could be useful to her. One distant corner of her mind (awoken, no doubt, by all the damn nightmares that insist on dredging up her muddy subconscious) wonders what John would think if he knew she were here cuddling up to his murderer. The thought drags a heavy sob from her throat before she can choke it down. In response, Carl gently rests one large hand on her shoulder, but makes no move to touch her beyond that. Clueless, invasive bastard though he may be, Carl never oversteps or assumes where touch is concerned. He’s waiting for her cues in all of this, and though she still insists she’d rather he leave her be, some part of Sarah thanks him for that.

Except…

“Are you fucking petting me?”

The hand that was rubbing soft circles on her skin stops in place.

“I thought you would find it comforting.”

She bites down on a laugh, struggling to maintain her hardass persona. Sarah has been putting up this front for so long now that it isn’t even second nature anymore, it’s her first response; the ease with which these new people in her life have overcome it disconcerts her. 

“Well, I don’t. Knock it off.”

He does. 

In a matter of minutes, the heat of Carl’s body and the exhaustion of her nightmares get to her, and Sarah slips down into the throes of sleep for the third time that night.

The years since she lost John have made Sarah an expert in numbing the pain. She’s hidden from it, run from it, tried to do everything she  _ could _ do to forget about it. She’s experimented with alcohol and with harder drugs to find the best chemical cocktail for the maintenance of her cloud. When she can avoid the dreams, she considers it a win. The only times she ever truly finds peace are in the brief aftermaths of destroying another terminator in her son’s name—then, and only then, does the pain really go away, rather than fade to the back until she can ignore it. Even in those, her very best case scenarios, the reprieve never lasts long. Refusing to face the root of her sorrow, refusing to acknowledge that the role she had been given as the mother of the resistance had lived and died with a boy she hadn’t been ready to raise, hadn’t had time to love, and couldn’t have prepared to lose, has slowly but surely taken from Sarah the base of who she was before October 12th, 1984, or who that Sarah, barring time bullshit and AI meltdowns, might have grown into. In her place, Sarah Connor has formed a tough exterior—has pushed her body to its limits in the name of physical training, studied every form of martial arts, weapons handling, and combustion she could get access to, and hardened her heart because it was easier than learning to feel again—all to protect some inner self she isn’t sure she’s in touch with anymore. In the course of trying to stay sane and operational, Sarah has become single-minded and efficient, machinelike in her ability to hunt and kill. 

Those same years, meanwhile, have taken Carl down the opposite road, delivering him purpose in a family and granting him the ability to face his own actions headlong. Lying still in the bed, Carl retrieves data from times when he held his wife though the nightmares she suffered after escaping her abusive home, and the times he had rocked Matteo as he cried, or stayed up simply talking with his son when things were difficult for him. While Sarah had, of necessity, drawn closer to where he had started, Carl became more like the person she might have been. By his own admission, there are some aspects of humanity that he may never fully adapt, but Carl has progressed from the mindless machine he had been, and finds himself, at the end of the line, sentient and empathetic—a being capable of so much more than his creators had ever intended him for.

Twenty-two years later, and through no conscious effort of their own, the two of them meet in the middle—a mechanical human and a very human machine—and find peace in Sarah’s bed in a nasty motel somewhere outside Jefferson City. The road to get there had been long, the path difficult, and the journey not yet over, but for the time being, one old war machine finds solace in another, and both of them start to figure out what the use for them is in a time of peace.

If Sarah has any dreams that night, she never remembers them.

“You must understand. The choice you are making right now could have unforeseen consequences long into the future. You must think carefully about this decision.”

Dani stands in front of the myriad fabric swatches laid out on the table and shakes her head. A few feet away, Sarah looks ready to start smashing her own into the wall.

“I don’t know, Carl. They all look good to me. What about these red ones?”

Leveling his gaze very seriously at her, Carl says, “You are on the verge of making a dangerous mistake. These red colors would be all wrong for the peaceful haven you are trying to build. For a sanctuary, you need something calm. Greens. Blues.”

It’s been less than a day since Dani finally began to realize the idea she’d started to nurture in the wake of Sarah’s violence, and, though what she has to show for it is startlingly small, she still bursts with more pride than she has in her life. As they speak, Dani and her companions stand in a dilapidated old motel building, abandoned to time and miraculously on sale in a small town in East Texas. The building is in Dani’s name, sort of (technically, the name on the books is Daniella Reyes, to match the papers doctored for her by one of Sarah’s shady contacts), and had actually been acquired by near-legal means, although the money used to purchase it was admittedly a good chunk of Sarah’s “liberated” Amazon stocks. This, for now, represents the culmination of her grand savior aspirations; it isn’t big, or flashy, but it is an opportunity—a chance to form a community she can protect—and it’s  _ hers. _ Saving the entire human race is an abstract goal that Dani can’t begin to fit into her worldview. Helping a handful of people who can use her assistance, however—that’s concrete. It’s the best she can do right now, and she’s doing it.

Unfortunately, in her renovation efforts, Dani made the mistake of mentioning that it might be nice to let Carl assist her when it came to interior design, which she can't claim to have a strong eye for. Dani’s best idea of a beautiful decoration is a big vase of flowers, and while she stands by that completely, she thinks it may take a little more to really pull a room together.

Carl, as it turns out, agrees. Too bad his opinions on the subject are so strong….

Exasperated, Dani pushes her hair back. “Well, how about I leave that to you? I’m sure I’ll like whatever you choose.”

Tilting his chin down a little to look at her, Carl nods sharply. “I won’t let you down.”

He walks away with purpose, leaving Sarah and Dani alone in what was once the motel’s lobby. Dani lets out a long sigh and leans back against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut.

“This is harder than I thought it’d be,” she admits.

Sarah laughs.

“Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet. Just wait until you start getting  _ people _ here.”

The plan for this motel involves a renovation effort that will (hopefully) see it converted into a shelter for homeless, abused, or otherwise needy civilians to take shelter and have access to warm food; ultimately, Dani would like to transform this derelict relic of American capitalism into something that is part soup kitchen, part shelter, and part recreational center. Reaching into the future, Dani dreams about the eventual possibility of adding rooms and beginning to cultivate a garden, too, but she doesn’t want to get too far ahead of herself only to flounder in the present moment under the weight of all the tasks to come. Sarah’s words and Dani’s father’s echo in her ears: stay practical, stay alert, don’t wander off into the future when there are things that need attending right now. They don’t even have working water yet.

“People, I can deal with. Trying to match curtains and wallpapers is too much.”

Sarah pauses for a second. Ever since Dani pitched this idea, she’s seemed a little distant, maybe uncomfortable, though she’s yet to actually denounce it. (Carl, on the other hand, had been agreeable from the start, and had actually been the one to suggest the location; apparently, the town this motel rests outside of is only one town over from the one that Alicia and Matteo had settled down in, and he appreciates the opportunity to be near them.)

“You’re doing a good thing here, Dani,” Sarah says at last, looking at the ceiling so not to make eye contact. “I never would have thought about doing something like this. I guess... I just thought that it was pointless to help people in the present, when I already knew they were doomed. I said there was no fate but what we make, but look at what I did instead—I destroyed, no better than the men who started that war. You’re not like that. You’re the best of us.”

It’s quite the emotional outpouring, especially from Sarah, who usually still pretends to have none to give. Dani doesn’t want to break the moment’s spell, but can’t help the wobbly smile that rises to her lips.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself either, Sarah. You stopped a whole apocalypse. You saved the world. How many of us can say that?”

Sarah smiles, then, but it’s a little rueful, a little bit self-deprecating. When you get past her no-nonsense determinator persona, she’s a hotbed of hurt that no balm can soothe. 

“John stopped the apocalypse. I was his  _ ride.” _

“No. You taught him, just like you’re teaching me. I couldn’t have done this without you. You  _ saved _ us.”

That seems to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Sarah pushes herself off the wall, turning away from Dani in the guise of straightening out her shirt. After a second of this, a beat that’s just slightly too long to be natural, she turns and shoves her sunglasses on over watery eyes.

“Jesus, things are getting sappy around here,” she says, leaning hard into the idea that this observation is a lighthearted joke, but betraying herself by the way she has to choke back the sob clawing to escape her throat as she makes it. “You gonna ask me for a hug next?”

Dani crosses her arms across her chest and watches knowingly as Sarah mutters excuses and makes her exit. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” she calls after her. When Sarah’s gone, Dani sighs and lets her head fall back on the peeling wallpaper, taking it all in. To call this place a “fixer upper” would be putting things mildly, but she can’t help loving it. It’s hers, it’s hers, it’s hers. She holds no illusions that the road ahead is an easy one. The work she’ll have to put in to make her vision for this place a reality will probably be harder than anything else she’s ever done (up to and including killing the unkillable Rev-9), but she’s got the two most determined people in maybe the history of everything at her side. All it will take is one action after one more, and she's already started the process. 

Dani is not running anymore.

Abandoning the somewhat disheartening vision of her haven’s decomposing interior for the time being, Dani takes the opportunity to stroll through the empty grounds, overgrown as they are with tall grass and fallen boards. Between the lines left by years of decay, she sees a picturesque vision of people finding community here, of  _ herself _ growing a home here. She runs her hand over the doors that are in sore need of a new coat of paint, imagining kids running past them, families finding relief behind their shelter, people letting themselves rest and pick themselves up and heal. In the midst of all this, Dani imagines herself at the center of it all, offering whatever she can to this end, not because she’s supposed to or because the future said she would, but because she has the means and the inclination to make the world a better place  _ right now. _

In that moment, Dani knows that however much work it may take to realize this vision she has, she’ll do it. The clarity that accompanies this understanding drags a smile across her face, and though she’s sweating under the Texas sun into clothes she hasn’t had the opportunity to wash in a week, Dani feels bright and good and clean.

At the end of the row of doors she walks down, Dani comes to the one she’s claimed for herself, a double room with a nice window that looks out on the space where she hopes she may one day grow her garden. Inside, she flops down on the bed nearest the door and sighs, allowing herself one moment of blessed relief as she pulls off her boots and cracks the joints in her neck methodically. Today has been a long day. Tomorrow will be longer. Still, Dani glances at the work-in-progress endoskeleton lain serenely over a tarp on the other bed, and she knows that her work isn’t done just yet.

On the morning that the terminator comes, Sarah Connor is packing her bags to leave.

They’ve been living in Dani’s safe haven for a little over two months when the cabin fever she’s been nursing with a steady diet of feigned ignorance and obstinate denial at last proves resistant to all treatment and makes of her a terminal case. It hadn’t been so bad at first. Fleeting thoughts, the occasional wistful sigh for a life of action; the mental equivalent of a small case of the sniffles. Even when her symptoms began to worsen, she had still thought them manageable. Lately, though, confinement to the peace and quiet of this sacred place has started to make her skin itch, and while her body has been plenty busy (under Dani’s leadership, the three of them have achieved working electricity in every room on the premises, patched up the most egregious of the holes in the roof, and even doctored a third of the rooms on the bottom floor to the point where a real human being might conceivably be expected to live there), her heart yearns for the adrenaline and purpose of a real, capital-t Task. Sarah knows, or at least tells herself she knows, that Dani’s way is revolution. Dani’s way is the future that will  _ work. _ Still, she aches with their halted inertia, and it’s sooner rather than later that Sarah finds herself pacing the room she shares with Carl nightly. 

Cabin fever? Who is she kidding. Sarah’s got stage IV cabin  _ cancer, _ and it’s metastasized to her brain.

By pure force of habit, Sarah never got around to fully unpacking the suitcase that had more or less been home for the past twenty years, so consolidating the net total of her worldly possessions, the physical proof of her human experience, is not so much as the work of a morning. The result is depressingly little. Apart from guns and ammunition, Sarah’s habits are ridiculously spartan; as she told Dani, she doesn’t even have so much as a picture of her son to remember him by.

It doesn’t take long for her packing efforts to disintegrate from “symptomatic of her commitment issues” to “shameless and deliberate stalling.” Even as Sarah hustles busily around the room in messy, oblong spirographs, redundantly searching every nook and cranny for something she knows she never had and would never have stored there if she did, she feels the heavy weight of Carl’s eyes on her from where he stands, unmoving, by the window. Part of her wants him to say something. Part of her wants him to block the door and tell her not to go.

What she doesn’t want at all is the statement she eventually gets: “Don't put away your guns. You will need them soon.”

Sarah closes her eyes and feels older than her years while a tired crease forms between her brows. She almost doesn’t want to ask, but hey, whatever else this may be, it’s certainly action. And action had been what she wanted. 

Hadn’t it?

“Don’t tell me. Another Rev-9 is about to crash down in Mexico City?”

“I can’t tell what is coming. I only know when, and where.”

“But something is coming.”

“Yes. Here.”

_ “Fuck.” _

Sarah reaches hastily for the nearest gun (foregoing the ones already strapped to her person, of course) and reloads the clip, running on instinct as she scans the limited view of the parking lot afforded to her by the room’s refurbished windows, as if she might catch their threat casually loitering among tumbleweeds and cracked asphalt. Which model should she expect to see, Sarah wonders. Experience has taught her to anticipate another T-800, the face of both her waking nightmares and the solid comfort in the dark that soothes them. But maybe she’s wrong. Maybe they’ll send a T-1000, that thing that had nearly killed John, just for a nice change of pace. Or, Sarah thinks, it’ll be a mother fucking Rev-9. Why not! Adrenaline floods her system as she considers each of these and worse, the most pessimistic part of her anticipating the chilling horror of yet another escalation, here to kill Dani for no reason beyond that the last one couldn’t, and she has to wonder how much more they’re going to be able to take.

“It will be here within the hour. I can take you to the exact spot.”

“Killbox?” Sarah asks, tossing Carl a gun, too, because in times like these, against foes like these, guns are her very best friends. He catches it effortlessly.

“Of course.”

The "exact spot" turns out to be neatly situated in the middle of the motel lobby, one of the few rooms in the haven already reaping the benefits of their renovation. Once Dani finds someone who can cook and is willing to work for peanuts, this lobby will be home to a full kitchen and dining area; right now, it’s been cleared of as much new-used furniture as was feasible in an effort to mitigate the damages. It’s time. The stand in a semicircle around ground zero, Sarah, Carl, and Dani—Dani, who had flinched visibly when informed of what Carl had felt (Sarah supposes that’s fair; nobody comes out happily from a terminator attack, and her first was more intense than most) but who had her boots laced and hair tied back in seconds, anyway, and who stands between them now, gun pointed stoically at the still-empty center of the room.

_ Pride. _ Sarah swallows it like bile in her throat and is glad for the distraction when the apocalypse begins.

The three of them can only watch as blue lightning spiderwebs across the broken linoleum tiles of the floor, and then step back as one when a ball of pure energy spawns in its crackling wake. As it grows, this ball takes out two and a half tables despite their best efforts at preservation. This alone, Sarah is sure, is enough to give Dani (who is as proud of this place as Sarah not-so-secretly is of her) a seething hatred for the thing. When a lone figure bursts into being, landing naked on its knees, though…

“What the fuck?” Dani asks.

There is some approximation of a man kneeling amid the wreckage of Dani’s future mess hall. The word “approximation,” here, is critical, because whatever that thing they’re looking at is, it’s not a man, and not just in the way that Carl isn’t, either. Whoever or whatever had sent this new robot hadn’t been as concerned as SkyNet with the effectiveness of their infiltration units; it’s man shaped, and has a nearly human skin tone just a little too orangey to be convincing, but one look at the thing removes any danger of accidentally mistaking it for a person. This new terminator has skin like a Halloween mask and a face to match; its hair, meanwhile, is wiglike and stringy. In an insult to organic life, all of these horrors are encased in a thin layer of some glistening, moist substance: a biological dermis that allowed their adversary to cheat the laws of time travel and which it wastes no time in ripping away with each inhuman motion. As it stands, the joints in its legs bend in the wrong direction. Sarah and Dani look at each other in undisguised confusion. Carl never lets his eyes leave the machine.

Upon standing, it turns in a slow rotation, completely impervious to the force of three guns all unloading their rounds at once. A red light emanates from the holes in its rubber skin where eyes should be.

A silent eternity seems to pass as the two sides size each other up, the world itself stopping to hold its breath. The terminator is still, lying in wait like a cat drawing out its prey, and then—it pounces. 

Before anyone can react, Dani is thrown off her feet. Just as quickly, she’s kicking and writhing, firing blind with her gun and calling out in panic while Carl and Sarah waste no time throwing themselves toward the fight in a mad rush to save her. Carl gets there first. As if the cat metaphor had occurred to him, too, he heaves their adversary up by the scruff of its neck and hurls it across the room, unfortunately taking out another table on its short trip into the drywall. The impact is hard and palpable, but no one there is naive enough to think the war won yet. 

A pessimistic viewpoint is so often rewarded by these encounters. Not even a second after its disappearing act, the new terminator emerges in a shower of plaster dust, relegating half a moment to a new scan of the environment before sprinting with jerky, robotic movements around the outer reaches of the room, drawing fire wherever it steps until it finally reaches a window and promptly defenestrates itself.

“Is it… retreating?” Dani asks, panting as she pulls herself to her feet.

“Those bastards can only focus on their target,” Sarah says. She’s breathing hard, too, but only allows herself enough of a pause to reload her weapon. “It must be running for some sort of advantage. Maybe it senses a weapon.”

Carl adds nothing, only takes off hot on the trail of his fellow. Sarah thinks it’d almost be funny to watch a man as old as he looks move as fast as he moves, if only she weren’t similarly old and not quite as impervious to the effects. They proceed cautiously into the coverless danger zone of the parking lot. When they make it out, it takes a second for the reality of what they’re seeing to sink in. 

Oblivious to their pursuit, this glorified animatronic is throwing itself through all of Dani’s windows.

Sarah sucks in a breath, her eyes fixing on Dani before either of them has the chance to say anything. There’s a warning in them.

“Don’t. Don’t do anything rash, it’s just doing this to draw you out—”

“Sarah,” Dani seethes, breathing through clenched teeth. “Give. Me. Your gun.”

Sarah frowns, looking between the guns in her arms and Dani’s. They match. “What’s wrong with yours?”

“No,” Dani says. “The big one.”

Oh. It’s about then that Sarah remembers the heavy artillery strapped across her back. In milliseconds, she’s got it unlatched and passed along to Dani, who wastes no time in setting her aim. She’s ready, she’s putting weight on the trigger, and Sarah is already starting to crouch into a squat to shield her face from the blast—and then Carl puts a big hand on her wrist and pulls it away from the ready.

“Don’t. At your current trajectory, you will have casualties.”

_ “Shit.” _

Sarah had been so entrenched in the terminator-hunting mentality, in which it is either kill or be killed, unintentional destruction of the environment and the probability of pyrrhic victories be damned, that she had forgotten an insignificant little detail concerning the three of them no longer representing the full population of Dani’s motel haven. About a week and a half ago, Dani’s uncle (whom Sarah had initially been furious to find she was still in contact with, but ultimately couldn’t fault her for, despite the risk) had sent her a text, well encrypted, with the location of some people he had recently assisted and who would need a place to stay if she could offer it. Dani and Carl had driven out to pick them up, and from then on, Dani had been housing her very first residents: a family of three—one woman, her mother, and her son—who had been displaced from their jobs by machines back in Mexico and who hoped to find something better in the backwaters of Texas. Sarah doesn’t know enough (won’t let herself get involved enough) to speculate on their chances, but for now, the three of them are staying free of charge in room seven on the ground floor, which just so happens to be right… behind… the terminator.

Perfect.

“You must draw him out,” Carl says. “I will distract him.”

Before either woman can react, Carl charges the rubber terminator. He roars as he drives it into the ground, smashing its skull into the pavement with all the savagery he had been programmed for, unrelenting until shreds of rubber start to fly from his fingers and the terminator’s face starts to sag like even more of the cheap mask that it is. In retaliation, the new thing writhes—not in even a token effort to fight back against Carl (its superior in every respect, Sarah thinks, though she has no idea where the thought came from or what she should do with it), but rather to squirm free and escape.

The thing is fast; Sarah has to give it that. Faster than Carl, even, because ever since she rebuilt his damn frame with Grace’s parts among others, his right arm and right leg (the two limbs she’d had to redo from scratch) had never functioned quite as well as they were supposed to. Make no mistake—they’re still strong as hell, and he can move them well enough, but they’re no longer  _ perfect, _ and the control he maintains seems limited. It had amused her, before, that she’d accidentally given a robot arthritis. If that turns out to be the deciding factor that costs them a battle, that costs them  _ this _ battle, she won’t be laughing anymore.

“If that thing gets away from Carl, there’s no telling what its plan is next. He was right; we need to draw it out.”

Sarah’s already marching for one of their two Jeeps, Dani at her heels. She slides into the driver’s seat while her cohort hoists herself up to standing and waves her arms above her head as high as she can stretch them.

“I’m over here, fucker!” she cries. “Come get me!”

The rubber terminator stops struggling against Carl for just long enough to lock onto the source of the sound. Sarah sees this minute pause and assumes the bait has been taken; she steps on the gas. Hard. Beside her, Dani shoulders the rocket launcher, face set in concentration. She’s ready.

Being slightly preoccupied by, well, driving, Sarah doesn’t have a lot of time to spend glancing in the side mirror to keep up with the ongoing gladiator match behind her. If she could see what Dani is seeing, it would go something like this: Carl makes to rip the terminator’s head off its very body, but lets up his restraining hold on the rest of it for just long enough to do so. In that half second reprieve, the machine grips his right arm and twists ruthlessly on the weakness Sarah had left him with, temporarily disarming him in an entirely literal sense. The rubber terminator wastes no time in rising, metal skeleton screeching as it grinds gears at unnatural angles and pulls Carl’s assault rifle with it. Before it’s even upright, it runs from Carl… but not toward Dani and Sarah.

It takes Dani a second to realize what’s happening, or rather, what’s  _ not. _

“It isn’t following,” she says. Panic sets into her voice. “Sarah, it’s not coming after us!”

Sarah twists to look over her shoulder and swears when she verifies Dani’s observation.

“What the hell is wrong with this thing?” she asks, pulling on the wheel to turn them around in a hurry.

She’s facing the motel again, but even reaching speeds that threaten to roll the Jeep, there’s no way she can push it fast enough. Dani is saying something very quickly beside her that she’s not picking up, the whole of her attention dedicated to the act of pressing the accelerator past its natural limits. Back at the scene, Carl is rising again, hardly sparing a glance for his ruined arm, but the rubber terminator pays him no heed. Instead, it scans, red eyes partially obscured by the drooping Party City mask around them until it reaches up with one hand and pulls the face off in its entirety. Bare and grotesque as Carl had been on the night of his resurrection, its motion stops, head staring down an object, neck twisted just a little too far to the right.

The terminator is looking at the other Jeep. Sarah is still too far away when she realizes what’s about to happen.

Carl’s legs, at least, are mostly undamaged, and he runs just as quickly as he ever did. Even so, Sarah watches, desert road flying by on either side of her, and she knows before she knows that he won’t make it. Their animatronic from hell raises its gun to one bare red eye and aims—she’s sure, she doesn’t know quite how, but she’s sure—at the gas tank. Dani screams "NO!" and Sarah pushes her own Jeep beyond every limit she’s ever broken in her life, already seeing the nuclear explosion of her nightmares sweep the playground except this time, it’s not a slide and a swingset that get obliterated, but humanity’s last hope, an abandoned Motel 6 up in flames. The sound of that shot seems inevitable, and then—

WHAM.

The shot fires, but misses its target. Sarah gapes for a second, uncomprehending, until it sinks in that the rubber terminator hadn’t managed to miss a shot from two meters on accident. Its aim had been subverted… 

...by an old woman with a suitcase.

The door to suite number seven on the ground floor gapes behind the terminator. In the chaos of the moment, no one—not Sarah, not Dani, not even the machines—had noticed this little abuela creep from the room with a heavy leather suitcase half the size of herself. 

None of them had noticed as she swung it into the thing’s arm.

The shot fired but was subverted into the back windshield, embedded into a seat; there is no explosion. The old woman—Señora Gutiérrez, if Sarah’s adrenaline brain is capable of recalling basic facts with any degree of clarity—stands over her victim, motionless. She looks a little shocked, but her face is set and determined to swing again if she must. The terminator wastes no time in raising the gun to its eye, but this time Carl gets there first and does quickly what he failed to do before; with one arm, he pulls the metal head right off the thing’s body, twisting its neck until the mess of joints and wires rip apart like tendons and not letting go until the red eyes in its head go black.

Sarah pulls the other Jeep up beside the scene of the crime with a screech of tires. Dani is out of the passenger seat before the wheels stop turning.

“What the hell,” she asks, looking tersely between Sarah and Carl for answers, “was  _ that.” _

“It bears a strong resemblance to a terminator series developed by SkyNet before me,” Carl says, walking over with a slightly unsteady gait. “A more primitive model. Not adept at infiltrating.”

In his hands, he holds his own severed arm, which he hands to Sarah. “By the way. Your engineering skills leave much to be desired.”

She sneers at him, but otherwise ignores the jab, her brow creasing as she delves deep in thought. Nearly underneath her breath, she quotes the words of a man long dead—words she hadn’t known she still remembered.

“The 600 series had rubber skin... we spotted them easy.”

“Yes,” Carl agrees. “It seems very likely that Legion sent an approximation of a T-600 model terminator. Who told you that?”

Carl stares patiently. Dani, too, looks at Sarah like she’s lost. 

“Have you seen one of these things before?” she presses.

Sarah’s eyes are glassy as she shakes her head, brushing gray hair out of her eyes without focusing on anything in particular. Her gaze is down.

“Kyle said that to me.”

“Who is Kyle?”

Sarah doesn’t—can’t—say. Carl waits a moment for his question to be answered, but once it becomes clear that Sarah isn’t in the right mind to oblige him, he turns to Dani instead.

“Dani, you were not the target of that attack. The way he behaved was too erratic.”

“Then who the hell was it looking for?”

It’s about then that they remember the old woman standing in their midst. Dani looks from Sra. Gutiérrez to Carl and back again. “Her?”

Carl takes a long look at the old woman, but ultimately looks back to Dani, curt. “No. In fact, it did not seem to know there would be other humans here. Her presence was a fortunate coincidence.”

Señora Gutiérrez has been blinking rapidly since the terminator’s head detached from its body, but now seems to have calmed herself enough to compartmentalize the fact that she’s standing among walking machines.

«...De nada,» she says, finally sighing and dropping the suitcase beside her. Her eyes are tired, but coherent. All in all, she’s doing a very good job of taking things in stride; actually, for the time being, at least, she seems to have come out of this debacle more present than Sarah.

Dani turns to her, then, mind kicking into overdrive as she busily checks for wounds or breaks she should have noticed before. «Señora, ¿está bien? Puedo explicar todo… más o menos. ¿Necesita usted atención médica?»

«No te preocupes, chica.» Señora Gutiérrez hesitates, then nudges the headless body of the T-600 with the toe of her boot. «El pinche se muere?»

«Si, pienso.»

«Entonces, estoy bien.» The old woman huffs, bending with a cracking noise to pick up her suitcase again before Dani can protest, then turning to shuffle back into her room, toward where her daughter and grandson are huddled behind the bed. She pauses at the door. «Este lugar ha dados nosotros un hogar. No permitiré los malcriados destruirlo.»

Dani gapes at the woman until she’s out of sight and gapes at Sarah and Carl once she’s gone.

“Is someone going to tell me why I am surrounded by badass old ladies all of a sudden?”

Sarah laughs, finally pulling herself out of a painful reflection to do so. “Your generation is so soft. Most of you have probably never even given blunt force trauma to a terminator before.” Tongue in cheek, she raises her eyebrows at Dani in good spirits, before sobering up and looking back to Carl. “So, it wasn’t her, and it wasn’t them. What was this one after? What was its mission?”

Carl frowns. “I have a theory. This terminator seemed focused only on destroying the building itself, and not any one inhabitant.”

“You think… Legion sent a terminator to destroy my motel?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“It means that your efforts are working. This place must be a threat to the AI system, or that terminator would not have come here.”

“Why send such a shitty one, then?” Sarah asks. “Everything up to now seems like it’s been an escalation. Why downgrade?”

“They may not have had any other choice. It seems likely that this terminator did not come from the same future that sent Grace and the Rev-9. In this future, Legion began to lose earlier. They had no choice but to send an underdeveloped infiltration unit.”

“They had time to develop time travel, but not make you?” Sarah asks skeptically. Carl turns to her, unimpressed.

“I am a very advanced bio organism. My creation took SkyNet decades. In comparison, it took them less than a day to understand time travel. Humans simply lack the perspective to figure it out. You impede yourselves.”

“Ouch.”

Dani cuts in on the squabbling, her face shining under the grime and sweat it had accumulated in the brief fight. “But do you know what this means?” She grabs Sarah’s hand and beams, from her to Carl to back again. “It means we’re winning! SkyNet or Legion or whoever the hell we’re fighting is  _ worried _ about this place. Our plan is working!”

Sarah’s face sobers up a little more, reminded of the very real threat that they face. She hesitates, but puts on an unconvincing fake smile for the kid. She deserves that much.

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s working. Good job.”

If Dani notices the faltering enthusiasm, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she starts chattering on about next steps, ways they can advance.

“—and tomorrow, I’ll replace the glass in the windows, and you can—”

“Wait.”

Sarah’s gaze has dropped to the dirt. She doesn’t shuffle her feet, stridently avoids even the smallest tell, but the exercise in self discipline is basically pointless; no quantity of still fingers or motionless features can change the fact that the expression on Sarah’s face is miserable. Dani knows instantly that something is up.

Now it’s Dani’s turn to exhibit signs of faltering enthusiasm.

“Sarah?”

“Kid, I didn’t want to tell you like this, but I think this is where you and I part ways.”

“Huh?” It’s more than faltering enthusiasm now; raw hurt breaks out across Dani’s face. Sarah pretends not to see it, averting her eyes even more purposefully. She feels rotten. She has to do this.

Quickly, she tells herself—like a bandaid. If you rip it off fast, she won’t have time to do anything but let you go.

“Hey, don’t give me that look. You knew we were going to say our goodbyes sometime, right? This attack reminded me what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not a fucking hotel manager, Dani. I hunt terminators. I belong on the road.”

Dani doesn’t say anything, just stands there looking confused and betrayed. Sarah knows it’s her fault, and tries not to feel remorse for it—they’ve all grown too codependent. It’s just as well she leaves now; if she stays any longer, it’ll destroy Dani when she goes. She should never have let Dani get so attached.

She should never have let  _ herself. _ Driving that Jeep, pressing the gas pedal all the way down to the floor and knowing there was still no way in hell to reach that thing in time, Sarah had felt a fear she hadn’t known she was capable of. The destruction of the motel had been as vivid in her head as the road in front of her. It was then that Sarah had realized the horrible truth; the itch inside her that had burned so uncomfortably hadn’t been wanderlust, or cabin fever. It had been the ancient, nearly forgotten desire inside her to put down roots. It had been a deep attachment to Dani’s shelter and its inhabitants. She hadn’t wanted to leave this center; she’d begun to realize, in fact, that she very much wanted to stay.

With this realization threatening the very core of her current existence, Sarah knows that it’s now or never. Without letting herself think about it, she puts her foot down. She chooses now.

If she gets attached again, she’ll only end up with the wreckage again. Just as well to let the severance be of her own design.

They stand in silence for a second before Sarah fumbles for her sunglasses, sliding them onto her face with one hand and patting Dani on the shoulder with the other.

“Don’t take it personally. I might still drop by from time to time to check in on you, if I can.” She hesitates, then: “And… take care of yourself, Dani. The future needs you.”

_ A hell of a lot more than it needs me, _ Sarah thinks but does not say as she turns around, patting her pockets for cigarettes. Before she can make her escape to the privacy of what will soon  _ not _ be her room, where she’ll be able to sniffle without giving away any indication that the lame goodbye she’d just offered hurt her just as much as it probably hurt Dani, Carl turns to the two of them and flips everything on its head.

“I’m going too.”

“You’re what?” Dani asks, incredulous.

“You’re WHAT?” Sarah says, furious.

“If Sarah’s goal is to hunt terminators, she will need my systems to locate them. My presence by her side is the most logical arrangement.”

In Dani’s eyes is the fear of being left alone, of losing everything she has in a very short period. If Sarah were the type to spend time looking in the mirror, it would not be an unfamiliar sight. “But—but what about this place?” she asks. “What if it’s attacked again? You two are going to leave me here alone?”

“If another attack is coming, I will feel it,” Carl tells her calmly. “And we’ll be back. Otherwise…” He looks to the closed door of room seven. “There are people here who recognize the value of your work. You will not be alone.”

He, like Sarah, puts a hand on Dani’s shoulder. Unlike Sarah, he allows the contact to expand into a full, fierce hug, where Dani grabs him and sobs and doesn’t ever want to let go. 

When Sarah had first met Dani, she had been callous, even cruel, because of her assumption that Dani was just the next poor bitch pushed into her shoes, carrying the future inside her because  _ destiny said so. _ Well, she turned out to be exactly that—just not in the way Sarah had expected. Dani Ramos is no Sarah Connor.

Watching now, Sarah remembers the way that John had screamed for the other terminator, “Bob,” as they stood over the molten iron in that foundry. Knowing he would have to let go, but not wanting to, not for anything.

Dani’s hug is like that.

Sarah turns herself away with some effort, loading her sparse bags into a Jeep without another word for the girl she’s made up her mind to abandon. She does not look at Dani once after that, just idles the car and waits for Carl despite her initial impulse to just up and take off without him, cutting her ties as cleanly as possible. He would only follow her, she reasons practically. (Practicality is the glue that holds Sarah’s current life, such as it is, in one piece.) Never rest, never falter. She does not wonder if there’s any other reason why she may want  _ this _ piece of  _ this _ place to be at her side when she goes.

Carl climbs in the passenger seat with his detached arm in his lap and waves with the other one. Sarah does not turn to see at what.

At no point in the drive does Sarah stop to wonder why it feels as if she’s losing her son all over again. It is only hours later, the sun long gone under the horizon and Texas safely abandoned 200 miles back, that Sarah realizes she’s driving the Jeep with the bullet embedded in the back seat, and she does not let herself consider why that might have been, either.

There’s a lot she's not doing.

The first thing that Dani tries to be in Sarah and Carl’s wake is  _ sad. _ She figures that if anyone deserves some time to wallow, it’s her; she’s been torn away from Diego, her father, and their home, she lost Grace without a chance to fully explore what they might mean to each other, and as if all that weren’t bad enough, right when things started to take a turn, right when they might've actually been  _ recovering, _ her friends decided to up and leave her when she needed them the most.  _ Sarah _ decided to leave her. Dani prepared herself for this inevitability once, but it’s been months since then, and she’s allowed herself to grow complacent in their companionship.

Once it happens, Dani knows she should have seen it coming. That’s the worst part. It’s hard to even blame Sarah for this, because it’s so totally in character for the woman—of  _ course _ she would leave when things are okay. She can’t stand peace.

Dani tries crying for about an hour after they leave, sobbing face down onto her covers until there’s a verifiable lake of  _ wet _ that clings uncomfortably to her skin. She cries and cries, but the tears stop long before the hurt does, and when she’s all cried out, Dani understands that it hadn’t been what she needed this time. Tears help her—she knows they do, when it’s the right time and place—but they won’t bring Sarah back (if Sarah knew she was crying, in fact, she would only be driven that much further away), and they aren’t making her feel any better. Dani slowly but steadily pushes herself upright in her bed, wiping messy tears across her face without much effect and allowing herself a few last sniffles while she looks around the room. Nothing has changed too drastically, apart from the obvious. The lights still work. The walls still need repapering. Her eyes drift until they land on the unfinished endoskeleton still laid out for her on the other bed, and this, finally, is the kick in the ass Dani needs to get moving again. She stumbles to her feet and sets her face. She’s going to be okay.

The second thing Dani tries to be after she’s left on her lonesome is  _ angry, _ and all things considered, that goes a lot better. Anger allows her to acknowledge her pain without dwelling on it, because ultimately, Sarah had been right; on some level, Dani had always known it would end like this. Anger lets her rally against the future that thought it could wipe her out with one half-baked terminator and renew her home renovation efforts with unprecedented vigor. She drives the Jeep left over from the fallout into town and marches herself into the hardware store with an attitude that will take no prisoners. Dani press-gangs an unsuspecting Home Depot employee into teaching her the intricate art of spackling, and within one afternoon, has replaced all the windows shattered by the rubber terminator, aided after an embarrassingly public struggle by the younger Sra. Gutiérrez. She reminds herself that even without Sarah and Carl, she is not alone.

In the days that follow, things turn up. Lingering sorrow over the memory of that other Jeep disappearing over the horizon, Carl waving from the window like a final punch to the gut, gets buried under a furious work ethic that sees her patching, repairing, and rewiring at a breakneck pace. A plumber is hired with funds that are, strictly speaking, Sarah’s (but finder’s keeper’s, right?), and running water is restored to all three wings of the complex months ahead of schedule. At night, the Gutiérrezes invite her to eat dinner with them. She gets to know these people she’s housing, and finds that she is very lucky to do so.

Things turn up. Her uncle sends her two more families, and Dani is glad for their presence. A Craigslist ad brings her volunteers, cooks from the local soup kitchen who are interested in her plight. Time passes quickly, and it doesn’t feel like very long at all before the buildings are safe, her i’s are dotted and her t’s crossed, and she’s finally ready to realize this insane goal of hers in earnest. Dani’s haven makes its debut under a sign that celebrates the grand opening of the Vicente and Diego Ramos Memorial House, and the tears she cries on this occasion are not painful, but so happy she may die. Runoff from the homeless shelter begins to trickle downstream to her doors, and she is eager to open them. 

On one warm and peaceful afternoon in the late spring, one of the shelter ladies confides in Dani that before she married and was subsequently abandoned by her abusive husband, she had grown up on a farm, and that in light of her improved circumstances, she’s recently been longing to tend to something that’s alive again. One sweaty, mud-streaked day later, they break ground just outside Dani’s window, and with no small degree of awe, Dani even gets to realize her smallest ambition, to have a garden of her own for the community.

In some ways, these months are the happiest of Dani’s life. Still, once dinner is over for the evening, once her residents start turning in and shutting off their lights, Dani returns to her own room with its double beds and single occupant, and there is always an inescapable loneliness waiting there to greet her. Being able to speak her own language again has brought a type of relief that only immigrants can know, but she still aches for the unique understanding she felt among Sarah and Carl, the only two people alive in the world right now who know precisely what she’s been through. This breed of loneliness acts as a push at her back, too, a fire under her ass; whenever Dani feels it start to swallow her up around her ankles, her knees, she climbs into the Jeep and drives into town, bunkering down at the local library and spending all the time she can spare reading every book on electronics, engineering, and robotics that she can get her hands on. The late nights she passes in this fashion catch up quickly, reacting poorly with all the work she puts in during the day. Dark hollows form in Dani’s face, but the eyes above them are bright, and she is not tired.

With every book Dani reads, every diagram she trains herself to understand, every circuit she finds incredulously that she is able to build, Dani puts a deadline on her loneliness. Sooner rather than later, she will cease to be misunderstood.

In these most productive days of Dani’s life, wherein she discovers her own strength and her own worth and the way in which she is able to take charge and shelter and resurrect, Sarah learns something, too: she learns that she is broken.

A day out of town, crossing the state border into New Mexico after not sleeping for the whole duration of their trip so far, she becomes aware of a persistent niggling on edge of her consciousness. At first, Sarah assumes it’s that same itch from Dani’s sanctuary, the one she’d been sure that leaving would relieve in her. It’s not, not exactly. This time, it’s more of a dull ache—the pain of distance pulling at roots put down and now unearthed without her consent. Carl watches her drive and she ignores him. He offers to take over and she snarls.

By the time they hit Arizona, Sarah knows that leaving was a mistake. It’s not making her stronger. The only thing her actions have bought her is an innate understanding of what she has to lose, what she  _ has _ lost. Behind the wheel she refuses to let go of, Sarah dozes for a second and nearly crashes the Jeep into oncoming traffic, and after that, even she can’t argue when Carl gently switches their positions, pulling them off at the first exit to stop at a motel Sarah doesn’t want to so much as look at. He insists she try to sleep, and the nightmares that had begun to loosen their grip on Sarah’s weary mind reassert themselves with vengeance. Sarah wakes in the night to the face of her nightmares and kicks and screams at him until she remembers where she is. He sits and takes it, making soothing noises like she is very young. Sarah wants to hate this, but she can’t summon the energy. When the sun rises, they start driving again.

California is Sarah’s least favorite state, so it makes sense to her that this is where they spend the most time. It’s easiest to hide here, so long as they stay smart. Sarah and Carl are good at being smart.

Depending on your definition.

She runs every morning, working out whenever she gets the opportunity because the burn of her muscles is the only real thing she has left. After they fix his arm to the best of their ability (it’s smoother with Carl actually conscious to guide her through the process, but the joints will never be perfect), he starts to come along with her. His participation is an irritant at best, and she wants to resent him and his omnipresent appearance in her life, but it doesn’t take long for Sarah to learn the merits of having a cyborg capable of lifting an aircraft under his own power as her spotter. She adapts. They haunt gyms and YMCA’s all along the west coast. Outside of that, there’s not much to do; no terminators come through time. 

Sarah thinks she’s lost her purpose.

It’s very quiet between them, until it isn’t. One day, they’re behind the wheel again, moving for the sake of moving like the twin perpetual motion machines that they are, when Carl takes it upon himself to finally break the silence.

“Why are you sad, Sarah?”

She bristles in her seat, looking out the window more purposefully than she had been before. No talking except when absolutely necessary for weeks, and then he tries to get her to open up about her  _ feelings? _ She should have killed him when she had the chance.

“Who the fuck said I was sad?”, she asks, feigning boredom as she rests her face on a fist.

“No one had to say it. It is obvious.”

She narrows her eyes, turning to him to make her irritation known. “...Right. Because you’re an expert on human emotions all of a sudden.”

“Not all humans,” he corrects. “Just yours. You have been acting differently since you said goodbye to Dani. Why did you push her away?”

Sarah supposes that she shouldn’t be surprised after all this time when the goddamn robot demonstrates deep insight (more insight than Sarah is capable of, and that’s the thing that pisses her off the most) into these stupid emotional matters, but it still comes as something of a shock. She stares at him, working her jaw uncomfortably for a long time before she can form an answer. When she does, she’s horrified to learn that it’s terribly unguarded and pathetically vulnerable.

“Why?  _ Why? _ Look at me. Look at my life. How can you of all  _ things _ ask me why I can’t let anyone close to me? Machines like you took away everyone I’ve ever loved. Losing her too would have destroyed me. Everyone I get close to leaves.”

Tears drip down her face, which is screwed up and horrible. She grimaces at Carl, who has his hands on the steering wheel, eyes on the road. The paragon of practical driving; unclouded by emotion. Naturally. Sometimes Sarah forgets he’s just a stupid robot.

“I haven’t left.”

Sometimes she thinks he forgets, too.

A knife twists inside her.

“Well, what’s taking you so long?” Sarah explodes. “You did a pretty damn good job of making me think you liked your cute little family back in Laredo. Was that all some big infiltration act?”

“No. I care for Alicia and Matteo as much as my programming allows me to. Perhaps more. Before this, my family was everything to me, and I wish I could have given them more of myself.”

Sarah grits her teeth and tells herself she’s making a mistake, just like she had when she’d crossed the state line out of Texas and known immediately that she left a piece of herself (one of the frighteningly few pieces she had left to leave, in fact) behind her. She can’t help it, though. There’s a piece of hatred locked inside Sarah’s soul that commands her to destroy everything that so much as  _ tries _ to get close, and it now latches onto this chance to alienate Carl, the one thing she has yet to push away and thus has left to lose. Another part, a guilty one, tells Sarah that even if it weren’t the case that she’s hellbent of isolation, the offer she’s about to put down would still be necessary penitence, because she was the one to show up and spirit Carl away from the family he’d become nearly human for, and she has yet to pay her dues.

“Then why don’t you go back to them.” Sarah’s petrified in her unhappiness, but her mouth keeps moving. It would be mortifying, if she were present enough to feel. “You look human enough. They’d take you. You definitely don’t owe us anything anymore. What the hell are you doing here?”

This time, it’s Carl’s turn to draw out the long silence. Sarah can picture the “loading… loading… loading…” screen in his head as he runs through whatever CPU-based dialogue options his systems are formulating for him. Her own software shows nothing but a blank blue screen—she’s well past the limits of her emotional capabilities, and somehow the thought of Carl following through with her ill-conceived suggestion is tearing her in two. She’s got no idea where this attachment formed—perhaps in those first few hours, the heat of battle by his side tricking her mind into thinking they were comrades? or was it all the time she had spent tinkering on his endoskeleton, playing Dr. Frankenstein and resurrecting him from the dead? or, more recently still, all those hours she had spent with him in bed, pulled in tight to his deceptively human body until he became a symbol not of terror and death to her, but one of comfort and safety?—but now Sarah’s got roots that run deep, and the thought of losing anything, even something like this machine she had been ready to kill, makes her want to dig in her fingernails and cry, don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.

Nothing scares her more than attachment. That was why she left Dani and her sanctuary. It’s only natural that Sarah push against this one, too.

“No,” Carl says at last, startling Sarah out of her near panic. “That time is over. Alicia and Matteo don’t need me now like they once did. They no longer rely on me. The money I left them with will be enough to live comfortably for several years, and Alicia has been attending night school to become a lawyer. She will be able to provide for herself.”

“What about you,” Sarah asks. “Don’t you want to be with them?”

“Negative. I want Alicia and Matteo to be safe, but I would easily have been able to ensure that from our distance in Dani’s motel. As a staple in their lives, I am obsolete. Matteo is mature enough to be a man now. In my absence, Alicia can find a relationship that will be more fulfilling to her. I can’t be what they need me to be anymore. But I can be that for you.”

Anger and fear and grief battle for dominance in the look Sarah fixes Carl with. Her eyes glisten with unfallen tears, and her mouth pulls back in an unsteady grimace. “I never asked you to be  _ anything _ to me,” she hisses.

“I know,” Carl says. “But I am offering.”

Sarah’s conflicted, hurting expression wavers for a moment as she takes in what he just said. He continues before she can open her mouth again to push him away.

“Without you, my orders were to wait in hibernation until SkyNet asserted itself and to fall in line as a soldier from there. You freed me from that. Without you, I would have died alongside the Rev-9. You saved me from that. Now I would like to free you from the prison you have made yourself, Sarah. I cannot offer you the companionship of a human man, and I cannot restore what I have taken from you, but I could be your life partner, if that is what you want me to be. And I will not leave you.”

Sarah is quiet for a long time.

“...To tell you the truth, I don’t think I can either,” she finally admits with a sigh of defeat. The charade of indifference lost forever, it ultimately makes no difference when Sarah slips the glasses from her face, tears sliding down the lenses as she toys with the arms in her lap. She hangs her head in a very un-Sarah-like way, and that makes no difference, either.

“I don’t understand.”

“Offer the companionship of a human woman,” Sarah says, leaning back in her seat again with a roll of her eyes. “Whatever that means. Ever since John… I’ve felt like a machine. Like I’m going through the motions, but I can’t really form relationships with anyone I meet, and everything else—all this playing nice crap—is just bullshit. Like… I’m only pretending to be a person.”

“Oh,” Carl says after an uncomfortable pause. “...I understand.”

Sarah huffs. “I bet.”

They ride in silence for a while, the car rattling over the desert road of the I-5.

“You are more capable of love than you think, Sarah,” Carl offers at last, still not looking at her. She doesn’t let the statement catch her off guard this time, but turns to scrutinize him in retaliation.

“Oh yeah?” And then, testingly: “And don’t you think that means you are, too?”

There’s a minute change in Carl’s expression that tells Sarah she’s taken him by surprise. He doesn’t let on any further than that, but then, he doesn’t need to. Sarah knows him better than anyone else by now.

“I think we should go back and apologize to Dani.”

Sarah turns to her window again and watches the road roll by for a long time. Inside, she thinks so, too, but she’s never been a woman with any patience for “sorrys,” and she’s not sure she’s ready to accept that her attachments may be positive after just one conversation with a terminator, either. She needs time. Even if the time she’s taking only makes things worse for all involved parties, she’s clinging to it with everything she’s got.

“You’re probably right,” Sarah concedes at last. “Now pull off at that gas station up there. I could kill for a bag of fucking corn nuts.”

Dani feels lucky.

That’s the only word for it, really—when she looks at everything she’s accomplished with her sanctuary, all the people she’s been able to help, all the good she’s been able to do, it feels unreal. Like, maybe someone out there could have accomplished this, but not her, not Dani Ramos, factory worker… except she  _ did. _ She was the one who had the idea.  _ Her _ hard work brought it to fruition.

And it wasn’t because of some future destiny bullshit, either. The future foretold to her was a future in which she fought wars, but this place’s very foundation is the peace and goodwill she can inspire between men. Maybe one day, it won’t matter, the machines will attack and it will all come to naught, but for now, her patronage is expanding, her community is growing, and hope is blooming around her just as surely as the flowers are in her garden. The most amazing thing about the place, in fact, is that she’s not alone, and the feelings her haven has encouraged in her are not unique—there are other people here who love this place like she does. They care for it. The Gutiérrez family had just been the start; now Dani has rooms and rooms filled with people who want this place to flourish. She has an in-home protection system that doesn’t involve high walls to keep bad things out.

When word about what she’s doing here gets out, it gets out fast. For a brief time, there are so many people asking to move in that she’s frantically setting up tents and doubling on rooms to give everyone a place, and there’s a brief moment of panic wherein Dani fears she may have bitten off more than she can chew—and then others in the community pick up the slack. Donations come in quantities that might have once been a fever dream, and people with homes in the town she’s established outside of (including, she is pleasantly surprised to learn, Carl’s wife Alicia) volunteer to house residents for as long as it takes to ease the strain. Dani breaks ground on a fourth wing to the Vicente and Diego Ramos Memorial House, and she hopes that its namesakes are proud of what she’s doing.

For the first time in her life, Dani sees how charity can become contagious. The people she houses give back to the home she’s built; one resident, a carpenter, helps her build a playground for the children between the three original wings. Donations flow in: clothes, necessities, but also books and toys and all kinds of things that Dani sorts through with misty eyes. She gets so much that she has to start shipping it off to other charities around the world, because she knows that other places aren’t as lucky as she is, and she wants to turn that around. She thinks she may be turning it around.

Dani gets calls from unbelievable sources, asking for interviews (to most of these, she politely declines, being that she’s still not technically allowed to be doing…  _ any _ of what she’s doing) and, even more incredibly, asking her permission to set up sister buildings to hers across the country, and then, the world. She’s told by one source that she’s done more for community in America than anyone in decades, and she doesn’t know how to respond. She only ever wanted to help the few people she could reach, but it turns out her range stretches a lot further than she anticipated.

Things get so busy around her that the amount of time Dani can justify spending on her more private pursuits dwindles, but not a day goes by that she doesn’t at least try to rewire a broken circuit or weld a new joint between salvaged scrap metal; Dani hasn’t given up on Grace, and knows she never will. Every night, when she finally retires to her room at maybe two or three in the morning, she presses a kiss to the forehead of her robot and thinks that it will only be a matter of time. 

Along with her long-term housing, Dani organizes other events and functions in her sanctuary that bring people in even when they aren’t coming to stay. In conjecture with the local soup kitchen, she starts up one of her own, open seven nights a week at various intervals. She also, more excitingly, begins a series of classes for anyone who wants to attend—everything from coding to knitting to martial arts.

It’s at a women’s self defence class that a couple of those anonymous drifters happen to catch Dani’s eye. Yeah, they catch Dani’s eye, because she just so happens to look up from where she’s sitting, and finds herself staring directly at  _ Sarah Connor. _

The woman sits (or,  _ lounges, _ might be the better word) across the room, legs crossed, leaning back in her chair like she never left and watching along with the crowd as the guest speaker Dani invited walks a volunteer through the hammer strike technique. For a second, Dani thinks she must be mistaken, or hallucinating—and then she notices the bulky form of Carl looking somewhat ridiculous in a little folding chair beside her. There are thirty minutes left in the class, but while Sarah never takes her eyes off the instructor, Dani can’t think of anything else for a second. The moment the demonstration is over, she’s pushing through the lingering crowd to grab Sarah’s arm as Sarah herself makes a beeline for the exit.

At least she has the decency to look embarrassed when she sees that it was Dani who grabbed her.

“...Hi,” Sarah says at last. Dani doesn’t know whether she wants to slap her or laugh.

“What are you doing here?” Dani asks, half shouting over the buzz.

“Learning how to defend myself. Cute operation you’ve got going on here, by the way.”

Dani can only stare at her, wondering how the hell Sarah could be gone for so long and just waltz in like this, and if she thinks Dani is content to act like nothing’s changed now that she’s back. She also wonders why the hell she  _ missed _ this infuriating woman so much.

After a moment, Sarah starts to look uncomfortable under Dani’s scrutiny.

“...I suppose you’re waiting for some grand, groveling apology, right?”

Dani keeps staring, honestly not sure  _ what _ she wants to do with Sarah, but certain that drawing out the torturous silence between them to see her squirm is part of it. Finally, she sighs, and shows mercy.

“No.” Dani claps a hand on Sarah’s shoulder and smiles at her, begrudgingly. “I understand why you had to go. I hope you found what you were looking for out there.”

Sarah looks at the ceiling, digging in one of the pockets of her jeans for her sunglasses. As she does her damnedest to avoid any acknowledgement that she may experience emotions, Carl finally makes his way back over to them. He’s holding two dixie cups, which he holds out to the women.

“I brought refreshments. Hello, Dani.”

She takes one of the cups from him and uses her other arm to wrap the big man in a hug, which he reciprocates. Dani feels a stab of melancholy run through her without warning—being so totally engulfed in a hug, feeling so safe in a man’s strong arms, reminds her instantly of her father, and with that memory, the knowledge that she will never get to hug him again. She pushes the grief away, but nevertheless has to take a step back from Carl to compose herself. He smiles at her pleasantly.

Dani notices that Sarah also took her proffered dixie cup, even though it contains lemonade, which, being that it’s not a dark alcoholic beverage, Dani highly doubts Sarah will drink. Hoping to catch up, she leads the two of them out of the crowded foyer and into the relative privacy of her garden. (Her pride in this space and desire to show it off having no influence upon this decision, of course.) Carl tells her where they’ve been, and Sarah occasionally interrupts to playfully insult him. Dani has to wonder what happened between the two of them while they were on the road, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. She’s glad they’re here.

They don’t stick around too long that first time. Dani offers them the room that had once been theirs, hoping to entice them to even a short layover before they leave her again, but Sarah predictably declines. They’re driving away for who knows where before the sun starts to set, and it’s all hard memories and deja vu, except… it isn’t. These past months have changed Dani, maybe as much as anything in her life. This time, when Sarah and Carl get in the Jeep to leave, Dani is right there waving them off, and she realizes with some amazement that it doesn’t feel like half her heart is leaving with them. There are so many things to do here, after all, and no time left for heartbreak. Besides, Dani knows now what she perhaps should have known all along: they’ll be back. Eventually.

And back they come. Three weeks after their first farewell, the prodigal Jeep rattles its way up Dani’s driveway all over again, staying the night this time after a little coercion from Carl that Dani watches Sarah give in to with no small degree of disbelief. They’re back again just over a week later, with excuses on Sarah’s end about needing a permanent address while she waits for a new shipment of weapons. It continues in this vein each time; the stretch they’re away shortens considerably while the duration of their stay drags out. Dani helps this along, throwing convenient excuses for them to stay beyond “I want you to”: she asks them to help her set up a new group of tents for temporary shelter, and then to retile the roof on one of her buildings’ original wings. The ultimate ask is for Carl’s assistance in completing her Grace-bot, and Sarah’s with replicating the recipe for artificial flesh. Sarah insists they stay until the project is done… just to “make sure she doesn’t fuck it up,” of course.

Little by little, Dani starts to wonder if she’s finally being understood, and concludes that even if she’s not, it’s well within her reach.

With a damp concrete bench under her ass and a half-smoked cigarette between her fingers, Sarah Connor should probably be feeling pretty uncomfortable right now, even disregarding the age-old itch to run away that builds between her shoulderblades whenever she lingers more than a day or so in Dani’s haven. She  _ should, _ she even finds herself deliberately grasping at reasons why she  _ might _ be uncomfortable, but the very strange thing is that she’s  _ not. _ In fact, sitting there on a bench after a brief, blessed rainshower cooled the baking earth beneath her, Sarah feels better than she has in years.

It kind of scares her. She’s not sure where all this contentment came from, and she’s certain that if she indulges it too much, it’ll slip away between her fingers.

Sarah draws in another lungful of carcinogens and holds it for a moment as she scans the grounds in her immediate vicinity. When her eyes catch on what she’s looking for, she lets out the smoke in a slow exhale.

Carl stands over by the playground, completely swarmed by children who vie for his attention. He’s laughing with them. It’s beyond Sarah how much of Carl’s genial behavior is an infiltration program for the childrens’ benefit and how much is representative of the genuine personality he’s improbably developed. It doesn’t really matter. The effect on everyone else is the same. As Sarah watches him delight the children with his strength (just now, his adoring circle of fans numbers five, and every single one of them is clinging to his arms or shoulders as he indulges their demands for rides), she doesn’t even notice the absence of the panic that would have once shot through her at the sight of him, a terminator,  _ this _ terminator, among children. If she were really pressed about it, Sarah might admit that she had been wrong about Carl; he had been able to change. As it is, she conspicuously neglects to run in on his cute little moment and shoot his fake flesh face off, and she considers that a truce.

She hates to admit it, but Sarah likes Carl. She may even be learning to depend on him (learning that she can; learning that he will never leave her or lie to her, learning that he is dry land in the sea of the unknown that she’s been drowning in since judgement day), as terrifying and repulsive as that thought may be. She takes another drag on her cigarette and leaves the butt smoldering on the bench.

From the direction of the communal kitchen, a matronly voice yells to signal the start of dinner. Sarah casually starts to make her way over to the swingset while the kids scramble past her in the other direction, sent off cheerfully by a waving Carl, who bends down despite his artificially bad knee to let them climb off his back in safety. Carl watches as the brats race each other toward the siren’s song of food, and the fond smile on his face doesn’t fade even after they’re long past watching.

It’s so cute that Sarah could puke. She convenes with Carl suspiciously, arms folded across her chest while she tries to put a finger on the subtle disturbance she’s sensing in the force.

“You  _ like _ it here,” she finally says, an accusal in her voice. He frowns at her, the tiniest bit of surprise evident in his features to one (like Sarah, now) who knows where and how to look.

“I am not capable of any preferences. I enjoy my time here equally to my enjoyment of time anywhere else.”

Sarah squints up at him, then shakes her head.

“Bullshit. If you couldn’t have preferences, I wouldn’t have had to listen to you drone on about curtains for the past two years. You like being around these families. You like…” Sarah waves her hand in the direction of the playground, “playing grandpa or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be. God, you’re soft.”

Carl seems to consider this.

“Protecting these people gives me purpose, just as my time with my family did. Do you not feel it?”

Now it’s Sarah’s turn to be taken aback. 

Sarah can’t consciously recall a time in which she felt real purpose in anything but righteous war, the crack of the gun as it fires with a terminator’s head in its crosshairs. She’d been lit up by the texts when she got them, but could never seem to do anything “for John” that didn’t involve destroying every last bit of the thing that killed him. If she thinks back a little further, though, pushes to where it hurts to go, she might recall the way she felt when she was first pregnant, the way she had endured morning sickness and all kinds of awful and embarrassing pains because there was nothing she wouldn’t do for her son, for John, whom she’d yet to meet but would already kill for, die for. There had been purpose there.

There may still be a purpose for Sarah in a community.

No way in hell is she going to let those snot-nosed jerks climb on  _ her _ back, though. No fucking way.

“Hell, you should have said something weeks ago,” Sarah says flippantly, evading the question. “Might have saved us gas money.”

Carl looks at Sarah carefully, one eyebrow raised. “I was waiting for you to be ready to stay. Perhaps you should have said something.”

Sarah sneers at him. “Don’t get smart with me, jackass.”

“My brain is a computer. I can’t comply with this order.”

Carl’s delivery of this statement is very serious, but Sarah looks at him and notices a slight quirk at the corner of his mouth that makes her question how close to human he can be, actually. She’s about to say something, maybe to the effect of confirming that they really did just agree to put down roots here indefinitely, except it’s this moment that Dani chooses to burst open her door and half emerge, her hair tied back and ratty, her eyes dark with insomnia and bright with excitement.

“Sarah! Carl!” she calls. “Come quickly—it’s Grace!”

Sarah barely has time to exchange a weighted glance with the robot before they’re both running for Dani’s door without a second thought.

They make incredible time sprinting across the courtyard, all things considered, but Dani doesn’t have the patience to wait. She retreats back inside without so much as shutting the door behind her, frantic as she is with the need to be there when…  _ whatever _ is going to happen, happens. 

Her head spins. She feels vaguely ill.

Ever since Dani’s camp added to its number a couple of old war machines (and on a permanent basis, no less!), progress on Grace’s body has been going well,  _ really _ well—far better, in fact, than would’ve ever seemed possible on all those sleepless nights she spent awake, decomposing over engineering textbooks at the library. With the addition of a few new specialty pieces picked up in some Nevada backwater, Carl was able to put the finishing touches on an endoskeleton designed to be as close an approximation of his own frame as possible while still accounting for Grace’s measurements. Sarah, meanwhile, managed to replicate her technique for the reverse engineering of human skin with an encouraging degree of success. Resting on the bed across from Dani’s own, the frame that for so long had been nothing but an inanimate, incomplete metal shell is now being wrapped in the inevitable progression of life. Skin inches further every day in a miniature game of manifest destiny, currently shrouding most of Grace’s head, her arms down to her fingers, and good portions of her torso besides. Stretches of her face are still missing, gaps like windows to the hard truth underneath, but Dani doesn’t—can’t—see these piecemeal features as gross, wrong, or viscerally upsetting. 

She understands now why Carl’s half-baked look never bothered Sarah. The sheer amount of time Dani has spent slaving away at this project has inoculated her to Grace’s metal features; every inch of skin that creeps up to cover them is nothing short of a miracle.

And speaking of miracles.

Dani watches Grace’s new body with bated breath and thinks (with no small degree of terror) that she may have actually pulled one off. This morning, the steady creep of Grace’s skin had made it necessary to bite the bullet and plug Grace’s “mind” into the port they designed for it, a step that Dani had long dreaded for its significance. As long as the endoskeleton and its brain remained separate, Dani could pretend that her work really was reaching its consummation. Putting everything together is a risk—if nothing happens, or, worse, if the  _ wrong _ thing happens, she will taste defeat and find herself at the starting line all over again. 

For an hour, then two, Dani’s worst fears seemed realized. She began to resign herself to another dead end, another barren ground zero.  _ You’ve been here before, _ she tried to reason with herself, a lump in her throat.  _ Not that it makes this any easier. _

When watching the unmotion of Grace’s lifeless chest grew too painful to bear, Dani drew herself away with effort, sitting down to work on finances for her haven in hope of a brief respite from the misty tears in her eyes and the disappointment that called them there—and that’s when the noise started.

At first: a low, rhythmic grinding sound like breathing that emulated from Grace’s chest, the first indication that Dani had  _ at all _ that the parts on her robot were even capable of moving by themselves. Dani panicked then, thinking that the machine was destroying itself and Grace along with it, but those noises were quickly followed by a few twitches along Grace’s arms and legs, and then—the biggest miracle yet—a movement not unlike REM behind Grace’s 1.5 artificial eyelids.

That had been the wonder that prompted Dani to call out for Sarah and Carl. Now, she kneels at the side of the bed where Grace lies (and if she notices the parallel to the first time she and Grace had been in a motel room together, Grace unconscious, Dani unsure, then she has more important things to do than dwell on it, but look how far she’s come, anyway), hands tight on one of hers despite its uneven mapping of flesh, and waits. It’s all she can do.

Time marches on, but Dani’s not sure she’s marching with it. With a detached sort of awareness, she notes that Sarah and Carl are with her now, asking questions that she can’t, and doesn’t, answer. Dani is at the pinnacle of everything and nothing matters but—

_ Grace. _

Her eyes snap open like a flipped switch and Dani nearly passes out with all the excitement/hope/fear she has to wrangle. The eyes (red lights partially but not entirely obscured by developing corneas) scan the room methodically, like a machine. Have they failed? Dani’s heart sinks to think that they may have built only a very advanced robot void of its once-human soul, but then those eyes alight on  _ her, _ and the voice that says her name like a question and an answer all at once does not sound mechanical.

“Dani?”

Dani makes a noise somewhere between a squeak of affirmation and a squeal of shock. She scrambles onto the mattress, framing Grace’s face with both hands and darting her eyes across it, looking for some sure sign that she’s done the undoable and made a Lazarus of her late guard dog.

“Grace?”

Grace is laughing now, incredulously, the laugh of a woman escaped from death. Her hands have found Dani’s face, they’re holding each other close, and in her excitement, Dani can’t help it—she smooches Grace’s cheeks and nose and forehead, and probably her mouth, too, because she is so glad and so shocked that she has Grace back that she can’t slow herself down for anything. It clicks for her then, in that moment. Dani is in love.

Grace, on the other hand, freezes under Dani’s many planted kisses, and Dani has an embarrassing moment in which she is  _ painfully _ reminded that Grace knows only a world in which Dani had raised her, had been some sort of maternal warrior figure. Did she go too far? Was...  _ that... _ even the intent behind the kissing? Dani knows she’s been attracted to women before (had spent months pulling Diego away from Julia half because he seemed determined to make them late to work on her account and half because Dani dreamed about warm eyes and dark hair and felt a petty stab of jealousy at the thought that Diego might know those things better than she ever would), but she never had time to parse the exact nature of her love for Grace back then, and has only just become aware of it right now. Dani starts backtracking, gearing up for an incredibly awkward apology… and then Grace looks at her like she hung the moon and stars to boot, and Dani forgets her crisis and her uncertainty and knows only one woman.

“But… how? My power source—”

“Saved us, Grace.  _ You _ saved us.” Dani’s smile is soft, endearing. She can’t believe she’s lived to see this day. “I had to thank you, I couldn’t let you go until you knew we killed that thing because of you.”

Grace blinks a few times, an effect which renders oddly underneath her still-unfinished skin and from within her backlit eyes. She pushes herself up a bit on augmented arms, and a few pistons move visibly within gaps where skin fails to cover the machinery.

“You brought me back from the dead because you wanted to  _ thank _ me?”

Dani beams, and is surprised to find that she’s broken out in happy tears, induced, no doubt, by a deep well of emotion she suspects she’s only just begun to tap. Now, sniffling over her grin as she marvels at Grace’s vitality, Dani tentatively allows herself to think a dangerous thought: that there are no more dead ends left to hit, that she and Grace have weathered the storm at last, and are now sailing calmer waters together.

She wraps her arms tightly about Grace with no intention of letting her go.

“I brought you back because I couldn’t live in a world where I let you die,” Dani says into her shoulder. Slowly, as if bewildered (which might be a gross understatement, given the circumstances), Grace brings her arms up to hold Dani in turn.

“Of course you did,” Grace breathes, like she’s lost in a memory. “I can’t believe I expected anything less from Dani Ramos.”

An unsubtle cough from the corner of the room nearest the door reminds Dani that they’re not as alone as she might like them to be. Flushing a little, she pulls back until only her hands rest on Grace’s shoulders (Dani selfishly refuses to give up contact altogether, and is gratified when Grace does the same) and clears her throat in a futile bid for lost dignity.

“Well, I had help. I could have worked on this alone for a hundred years, and I would probably still be lost.”

Grace looks up, as if registering for the first time that the world she has been brought back into encompasses anything beyond Dani’s arms. 

“Glad to have you back, Grace,” Sarah says with an acknowledging raise of her eyebrows. Beside her, Carl nods.

“Welcome back.”

Hearing the slight metal tang underneath Carl’s voice—the byproduct of the speaker Sarah always said she meant to replace but never got around to—the second robot in the room makes a face.

“What happened to your voice? You sound like shit.”

Carl blinks at her once, then responds, monotone and tinny: “At least I still have all my face.”

Dani whirls around to enact a sharp gesture of admonishment, but the damage is done; as soon as he’s said it, Grace gains a dawning awareness of the body she’s woken up in, feeling her face with two patchwork hands and then holding out those same to arm’s length, the better to examine them in all their metal-jointed glory. Her expression goes from confused to  _ very _ confused, and questions are surely imminent. 

Dani curses inwardly. She meant to ease Grace into the knowledge of how, exactly, she’d been restored, but Carl—infinitely subtle—seems to have taken that option away from her.

Whoops.

“Uh, Dani?” Grace says, her voice an octave higher than usual, a sign Dani recognizes intrinsically as a symptom of Grace flipping the fuck out. “I’m going to need you to explain to me what  _ exactly _ you did while I was out.”

“Um…” Dani tries. Sarah cuts her off.

“You’re a robot, kiddo. Don’t worry—it gets easier.”

Dani shoots a dirty look at Sarah to match the one she’d given Carl. She’s starting to seriously regret calling in the cavalry at all, though retrospect makes her wonder why she ever expected something like tact to come from the two of them. Grace, meanwhile, catches Dani with an expression that clearly screams “what the hell” from every half-baked feature.

“I’m what?”

Dani scrambles to explain.

“After the fight, we found a… well, some sort of chip in your head. Carl told us it was a log of all your memories. So we made a body for you. A new one.”

The more Dani says, the more impossible it all sounds; she winces against the flow of words she can’t seem to stop. Even so, confusion dawns to understanding on Grace’s face.

“You built an endoskeleton capable of supporting that chip?” she asks, unconsciously fingering the base of her skull. 

“Well…,” Dani shrugs sheepishly, unsure how to phrase this. “Yes?”

Grace gapes. “The technology you would need to do that kind of thing is years…  _ decades _ away in this time. Dani, you engineered it from scratch? For me?”

Dani isn’t sure why she’s blushing, but damned if her cheeks don’t burn. “Of course,” she says finally. “It was the only way to get you back.”

Grace looks awed and lost at the same time.

“But  _ why? _ I completed my mission, Dani. I don’t have any orders left. You don’t need me.”

“First of all, I  _ do _ need you,” Dani says, fixing Grace with a severe look and pulling a little closer to her again despite herself. “And second… well, I guess you’re just going to have to figure out your place here the normal way, like everyone else. No more orders. No more future. All we have is each other, right now.”

Dani looks up at Sarah and Carl, who, despite themselves, have done just what Dani suggested and found spaces for themselves in this world that have nothing to do with the roles the future once laid out for them. Her arms around the solid metal frame of Grace’s miraculously living body, Dani feels her heart kick and thinks that maybe, finally, they’re all four here, facing a future that contains only God knows what.

Although she has by now spent more of her adult life living outside the United States than within it, there are a few traits of Sarah Connor’s that mark her as indisputably American. Her taste in food is one of them. The way she grieves is another.

Sarah interacts with death in a very American way.

She fears it, and ignores it. Thinks about it as little as she can, and lets her dead slip through her fingers and every good time along with them. SkyNet and a terminator took John away from her, but Sarah’s own choices have cemented his absence; she refuses herself the memories of loving John for fear of the memories of losing him.

The longer she lives around Dani (Dani, with her flowers laid fresh biweekly on shrines maintained in honor of the father and brother she still sometimes talks to, semi-sweet in her recordance of happier conversations), the more Sarah wonders if there may not be some other way.

It takes her weeks to so much as broach the subject, and even then it’s halting. Stilted. The delivery is emphatically  _ not _ Sarah, but then, neither is the request; Sarah spits out the last of what quickly became a winding, laborious appeal for what should have been a simple plot of land in Dani’s garden, and Dani blinks at her a few times, disbelieving. They have to stare at each other for one long, painful moment so uncomfortable that Sarah contemplates hitting the road again before a look that couldn’t communicate “oh!” any better if she said it out loud passes over Dani’s face, and it finally must click that this is Sarah’s version of sincerity. The change in Dani’s demeanor is immediate. Brushing off her shock with an expert hand, she moves swiftly into a discussion of the physical practicalities of Sarah’s memorial—hard ground for Sarah to stand on. Dani is patient without being obviously so, and Sarah appreciates that. Even when she knows it’s justified, she hates feeling handled like a piece of broken glass.

Despite the support, or maybe because of it, Sarah purposefully waits for a time when she knows Dani will be occupied reintroducing Grace and her newly restored human visage to the wonderful world of the living before she actually lays out the “grave.” It isn’t much—Sarah overthrows more than two decades of maternal perfidy, and the grand results are unobtrusive enough to fit in a breadbox. She comes to the garden with a midsized rock that she had engraved with John’s name and birthday, a bouquet of flowers from Dani, and a little wallet-sized piece of paper that had been slipped under Sarah’s door one morning after Carl rose inexplicably early: a tiny portrait of John’s face.

Sarah’s not an idiot; she knows where it came from. She also knows the implicit horror of when and where he must have gotten it, the one chance Carl would’ve had to memorialize this face. It’s a moment she herself has memorialized all too well. She wrestles with grief, disgust, but these things war too with this image of her son that she’s seeing for the first time in twenty-four years, and in the end, she’s thankful, both for the opportunity to see him again (to commit every line in his face to memory, to atone for forgetting) and to Carl, for not trying to talk with her about this one thing he’s done that she will truly never be ready to move past. Sarah has forgiven Carl for what he did, so much as she can, and she’s found lately that she can no longer resent him for what he was programmed to do. This doesn’t make it any easier to face the stark truth; Carl killed John, and she’s here with him anyway.

Silently slipping her this most precious of gifts had been kind, thoughtful. Sarah’s not used to the people around her being so kind.

John had been kind.

He had been kind, and furthermore, kindness came naturally to him. John’s kindness matched her cruelty;  _ he _ stopped Sarah from smashing that other terminator’s brain.  _ He _ held back her hand when she went to kill Miles Dyson, and  _ he _ took it calmly upon himself to guide that child from the scene of his father’s brutal attack. Sure, John had moments of selfishness, and thoughtlessness. All kids are wont to. More than that, though, he had been brave and caring and everything that Sarah’s world wasn’t after he left it. John had been better than her, in the same way that Dani is. Sarah wonders if they would get along, and is certain they would. She smiles a little at the thought of how they might interact, and lets that bittersweet pain run over her as she carries herself to the spot that she and Dani cleared.

Stiffly, Sarah kneels to lay down the stone and the flowers, keeping the picture for herself. She looks at it for a long time, glassy eyed, and then puts it away when tears start to fall. She’s careful not to smear it; she couldn’t bear that. Not now.

“Hi, John,” Sarah says, wiping tears away from her eyes with the back of one hand and laughing a little despite herself. “I guess it’s been a while. I’m… sorry about that.”

She laughs again, tears practically sizzling as they hit the hot, packed earth.

“Guess I never was too good at expressing my feelings. Sorry about that, too. There were so many things I wish I could have told you… things I should have told you more. I love you, John. You’re the whole world to me.”

She sniffs hard, tears falling faster than she can wipe them away, but there’s a new smile shining through them. It’s a smile she should have given him more when he was here. 

A smile she can still give him now.

“I hope you don’t think too horribly of me for everything I’ve done. It’s been… it’s been so hard, John. I miss you every day. The people I’m with now, though—they’re good people. You would like them. Dani, and Grace… and Carl.

“I wish you could’ve known Carl the way I know him now. I can never forgive him for what he did to you, but he’s not what he was. I think you’d understand that. If anyone could see past that, it’d be you. I always… admired, how kind and forgiving you were, John. I wondered where you got that, because it sure as hell wasn’t from me. You’re so  _ good, _ John.”

She sobs openly now, arms hugged around her waist and eyes squeezed tight, head bowed. Part of Sarah wants to reach for her sunglasses, but she quells the urge. She owes him this much.

“I miss you, John. I miss you every day. I hope you know that. God knows I didn’t tell you enough when I had the chance.”

She inhales deeply and grimaces. Sarah has reached the far limit of her emotional capabilities, and though this doesn’t exactly feel like a good place to sign off, she can’t for the life of her think of a single additional word to say. In the back of her mind, she reminds herself that she’ll always be able to come back, now. This isn’t her last opportunity to visit this place; it’s her very first excursion. Sarah will have time to practice speaking to her son in the future, and she can only get better from here.

The thought is comforting.

Surrounded by the tall bushes and climbing vines of Dani’s Eden, Sarah finally falls apart and grieves for John, totally and unabashedly, in the way she should have grieved back in 1998. She cries twenty-four years worth of backed up tears, lets them run down her face (with a  _ purpose) _ and cleanse her, cries until she can’t cry anymore, and then she just stands there. She feels lighter.

Sarah may have stood there grieving over John forever, except a heavy set of footsteps chooses this moment to break through her quiet until finally, predictably, Carl’s bulk emerges from the leaves. The second he sees her, he stops dead. All of his inertia dissipates in a single faux pas.

“This is a private moment. I’m sorry. I should not be here.”

He starts to turn around, back to wherever it had been that he was before, but Sarah reaches out faster than her brain is moving and stops him.

“No,” she says, pulling him closer and burying her damp face in his chest. “Don’t you dare leave me now.”

Carl glances down at the engraved rock by their feet and wraps his arms around Sarah in turn, holding her gently enough that she doesn’t break but tight enough that she can’t float away.

“Of course not,” he says. “Never.”

It’s hotter than hell. 

Three weeks have passed since Grace’s miraculous resurrection, two since her appearance became incongruous enough to venture into public, and this places them in the firm hold of the dog days of summer; being that they’re in Texas, this is all to say that temperatures haven’t dipped below 100°F since the sun rose. Dani is currently warding off the heat as best she can under a ratty baseball cap, languishing against the cool, shaded wall of one of the buildings while Grace is on her back beneath the Jeep, doing some, and this is a direct quote, “mechanic shit.”

There had been a brief and futile scuffle (as doomed from the start as... well, Legion), during which Dani pleaded with Grace to wait for at least the minute relief of nightfall before undertaking any physical labor, and Grace argued petulantly that she’d spent enough time idling indoors to last her the rest of her life while they waited for her skin to grow back, and besides, she no longer feels the heat’s debilitating effects, anyway. Unfortunately, this does nothing to inhibit the natural reality of a terminator—that they have, as Kyle Reese told Sarah Connor forty years ago, human flesh, skin, hair… body fluids. Sweat sticks Grace’s wife beater to her skin such that her cut body and lithe figure are meticulously outlined, a fact of which Dani is all too aware.

She tries to keep her mind off of the breasts and biceps of a woman who will never see her as anyone except the great resistance hero who raised her, and consequently comes very close to dropping the refreshment she had run inside for in her distraction.

“Grace.”

“Just a second.”

_ “Grace.” _

Grace’s head peeks out from under the car, where she just got through wiping an attractive smear of grease across her forehead. Dani gulps. She’s in deep.

Giving her head a good shake to snap out of whatever sapphic fugue she’s fallen into, Dani switches gears, trying to adopt a stern, no-nonsense edge to her voice. “I’m not letting you get back under there until you take this,” she says, gesturing with the bottle of water she’s holding. “I don’t care what you are now, hydration is important.”

Grace groans, but pushes herself out and up, taking the bottle with a look that tells Dani she’s being  _ indulged. _ Dani reflects that if this is her attempt at making Grace think of her in a less matronly light, she’s doing a really piss-poor job.

“Okay,  _ mom,” _ Grace says (and Dani debates the relative merits of burrowing underground indefinitely so she’ll never have to face the mortification of this moment), uncapping the bottle without taking her eyes off Dani and downing one long gulp before she lifts it up and pours the remainder over her head.

Dani can only stare.

“Why did you do that!”

Grace blinks, like she doesn’t understand the question. “To cool down,” she says slowly. “I’m covered in sweat.”

“But… but…” Dani is so distressed that she can’t even pinpoint why. All she  _ can _ do is stare at Grace’s shirt, which now makes no effort whatsoever to hide her abs, or, for that matter, any other part of her anatomy that Dani may find conveniently arousing. She’s ogling. She can’t help it.

Grace gives Dani a funny look as she leans against the wall next to her and lets out a long sigh, brushing a hand over the short, fuzzy buzz cut she’s trying to grow out to her usual length. Dani politely averts her eyes, because the alternative is that she’s going to start drooling.

Might be awkward. Considering the circumstances.

“Dani, can I ask you a question?” Grace asks, and Dani feels her heart race, certain that this is it, that her Connor-esque lack of subtlety has been her undoing and that she now has no choice but to face whatever’s been building between them since the second Grace opened her eyes and risk throwing everything away on unreciprocated feelings… except that whenever Grace blusters on without waiting for an affirmative, what she actually asks is, “What’s going on with Sarah and Carl?”

Not sure if she’s relieved or disappointed, Dani lets out a shaky breath and snorts. If that isn’t the damn question of the year.

“I don’t know. Since you were gone, they’ve gotten pretty close.”

“I can see that.” Grace nods. “But  _ how _ close? Are they, uh…,” she makes a face, raising one lewd eyebrow. Dani reflects that she can’t possibly imagine talking to her mother like this, and thinks, maybe that’s a good sign. 

If it is, it’s much needed. There haven’t been very many of them.

“...Screwing?”

Dani chokes.

“Grace!” 

“What?” Grace says defensively. “My room is right beside Sarah’s, you know. It definitely sounds like they’re—”

“Don’t say it again!” Dani yelps, giggling through her mortification.

Grace’s attempt at stoicism holds out for one more second, and then a grin like the sun emerging from behind storm clouds breaks out on her face, and she laughs at this one inconsequential, immature moment they’ve made for themselves. Dani laughs too, and decides she likes it. She should afford herself more moments like this; maybe they all should.

“She wanted to kill him when we first got to Texas,” Grace says. “I think it’s a valid question! Seriously, what happened while I was gone?”

The question makes Dani sober up a little. She picks at the brick wall with her fingernails.

“You were gone for a long time, Grace,” she says, quiet. “A lot of things can change in two years.”

An intense look flits over Grace’s eyes. Sometimes, Dani remembers the red lights underneath their human shells and can picture them all too clearly. It doesn’t scare her, though. Grace hasn’t scared Dani since they were in that stolen truck on the freeway together, and in retrospect, the idea of being scared by this woman at all feels absurd. Laughable.

“Have you?”

Dani smiles, bittersweet as when she brings flowers to Diego and her father, but she does not look away from Grace when she admits: “Of course.”

Grace turns so she’s facing Dani fully, intense eyes searching her, one hand gripping Dani’s so hard it nearly hurts (but not quite).

“What am I to you now, Dani?” Grace asks, a desperate plea swimming in her too-wide eyes. She asks the question like she needs the answer more than oxygen, more than the water she’d wasted so carelessly scant minutes before. And she does. In her new life, Grace needs none of the human necessities—food, water, shelter—yet has not rid herself of need altogether, but rather replaced it, replaced it all with Dani Ramos, in her blood, her lungs, her hands and lips and mouth. She continues. “Ever since I came back, you’ve been different. I know I’m… different, too, but I… it feels like you’re trying to distance yourself from me. Are you? Is it because of the way I came back? I need to know  _ why, _ Dani. Please.”

Dani feels frozen under that intense gaze like headlights she’s caught in, awaiting an impact that might put her out of her misery if it would ever deign to come. She looks up at Grace and her heart aches, and she can’t decide whether or not she should tell Grace the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, right here, right now, and risk losing her if the answer proves too much to absorb. She swallows hard, and tries, because Grace deserves that. She does.

“I’ve been trying to be more like the Dani you knew before,” she says honestly. “I thought it would be more comfortable for you.”

Grace looks lost, but not hurt, and Dani thinks that maybe she’s on the track to doing something right by her, completely inadvertently. She’s flying blind, and grabbing at Grace in the dark. 

Dani’s grip on Grace’s hand is almost as tight as Grace’s on hers now.

“I like the you that you are,” Grace says, eyes wide still, like she can believe neither the words in her mouth nor the situation that put them there. “The one I travelled across time to meet. I like  _ you, _ Dani.” Grace averts her eyes for the first time since the conversation had taken this intimate turn. Immediately, Dani misses their intensity; the loss is akin to standing under stage lights and being suddenly plunged into darkness. “I hoped that maybe you would like me too. It was stupid. Before I became… this, I let myself believe I had a chance.”

Grace’s laugh is dry and self-deprecating. Dani thinks she may be beginning to understand, and a crease furrows her brow.

She raises a hand to Grace’s cheek and tilts it down toward her, coaxing Grace to look her in the eyes and see the concern painted there.

“Grace… what are you saying?”

Under Dani’s gentle gaze, Grace wants to squirm, to pull away, but Dani isn’t letting her. There’s only one other option. She gives in.

“When they made me an augment, I told myself that I was… I don’t know. Human but more.” 

Grace rubs her free hand over her elbow, looking uncomfortable and human, uncomfortably human, but feeling the gears click in her joints just underneath the careful lie of her skin. “Now that you brought me back, I’m not sure what I am anymore. Sometimes I think I’m human but less. A terminator.”

Dani is overcome. 

“Carl told me he couldn’t love his family like a human could. Is that… how you feel?” Her voice is nearly a whisper, so wholly intimate it is meant only for Grace. Maybe all her words now will be like this, low and intense, because Grace is the only one for whom she wants to say them.

Grace’s head lifts fractionally, and that gorgeous intense look is back in her eyes as she swears, “No. I still—I still love.” She gulps, and sets her jaw in a way that tells Dani she’s made up her mind to do something very difficult indeed. “I still love  _ you, _ Dani.”

Dani’s eyes burn with tears and a revelation that stops her heart, shatters her ribs, unmakes and reshapes her. She looks up at Grace and says, “Then you are human  _ enough.” _

And then she’s being kissed. It’s fast and rough, as intense as Grace’s eyes and just as warm, and over so quickly that Dani’s only proof it happened at all is circumstantial evidence: Grace pulling away with a dazed look on her face, wiping her mouth with the back of one augmented hand.

“I’m sorry,” Grace breathes. She’s panting, every inhalation far more laborious than the short kiss really justifies, especially given her complete and total lack of actual lungs. “I’m sorry. I just had to, um… I mean, I’ve wanted to do that since I was thirteen years old.”

Now it’s Dani’s turn to regard with eyes improbably widened. She’s got no worldly clue what happened, what alternate reality she’s stepped into. 

Very quickly, Dani decides that if she’s stepped out of her own world and into this one, then she’s never, ever, going back.

“What? But I thought you said—”

Grace’s face is improbably red. “You were always there for me when I was growing up, Dani, but I was already a teenager when I met you. I told you that you raised me back there because it was easier than explaining what you really meant to me, okay? At first, you were sort of like an older sister, I guess. And then a friend. Before I was sent back, I wanted to be more. I think you knew that. I don’t think you... felt the same way.”

Dani gapes, because for the millionth time, she feels blown away by this woman, her protector, her friend. There is only one way she knows to respond, and she must; otherwise, although she’s the one with a head free of wires, she’s certain she’ll short circuit.

“And what if I told you, if I told you you were wrong?”

Eyes staring like she’s looking at something ineffable, something she simply can’t comprehend, Grace shakes her head imperceptibly. “I’d know I was dreaming,” she says, breathless.

Dani rises on her toes and wraps a hand behind Grace’s head, pulling her down. Before their lips meet, she whispers, voice quick and urgent as a kiss ever was,  _ “Then don’t wake up,” _ and then it’s happening, Dani’s kissing Grace and being kissed, right there in the parking lot of the communal housing she built, the Jeep beside them and forgotten, the pavement beneath them as hallowed a ground as any Dani’s known. The sun beats down on them, but neither minds it.

It feels like rebirth.

The anniversary of the day that Grace was sent back in time to subvert Dani’s fate draws ever closer. It’s not the kind of thing one celebrates, generally, but when you’re a group of fucked up, nigh-unkillable cockroaches from the day after judgement day, you cling to every tenuous opportunity for merrymaking you get, and so that’s what they’re doing; they’re throwing a fucking party. 

Dani encourages the effort. She’s come to the firm belief that celebration and camaraderie are essential in a flourishing community—that you can’t just supply people with their most basic needs and send them off alone to deal with the harsh reality of, well, everything else; you have to show them something worth  _ living _ for. Today, the scope of her offer is a single movie played by a projector of questionable origin onto a bedsheet strung up in the cafeteria (the best she could do on short notice), but it’s something. For many of Dani’s residents, it’s more than they had yesterday.

She lets Grace pick the movie, which may or may not be a mistake. 

In the process of giving her girlfriend this honor, Dani conveniently forgets the fact that this late 20-something had actually been born in 2006, and boasts a very limited knowledge of pre-apocalypse films to match. The consequent choice unearths a Disney abomination that Dani found intolerably overplayed  _ seven years ago, _ but the shine in Grace’s eyes when she recalls it as her favorite movie before the end breaks her will. Oh, well. The parents may hate her, but the kids will like it, and ultimately, it takes very little to please the guardians of children who get to smile, some of them for the first time in a very long time.

Little things like that tell Dani she’s made a difference by establishing this place. Even if the machines rise up tomorrow, even if they can’t avert the dubious inevitable, she’s helping people who are alive today, right now. Dani’s sick of what-ifs. She’s through with running. She’s established a home, not just for herself, but for everyone she can reach and others beyond them, in homes like hers that have taken on a scope (a  _ movement) _ beyond what she can control or is even aware of. 

She’s done a good thing, and it would never have been possible without a bizarre chain of events kicked off by a sentient AI sending a robot back in time to kill her. Well, hey. Dani figures that’s worth celebrating.

Grace finishes up the indoor preparations by setting down her last ratty couch with a flourish, and Dani gives up a quick round of applause for her ultra-strong human forklift. That’s what she likes to see; machinery decades ahead of its time, the meticulous product of almost two years of Dani’s life, being put to work on menial labor. Dani can’t help herself. When Grace saunters back over, tight t-shirt pulled over muscles that are human-but-not, Dani pulls her down to share a quick, private peck on the lips before they go traipsing back into the public eye to advertise the event. 

The sun is harsh. Blinking against the sudden transition from artificial light to its unforgiving radiance, Dani scans the grounds for likely takers; Grace in hand, she sets off toward the loud congregation of children on the playground. 

Coming closer, Dani discerns that a great number of them are flocked together already… around Carl, who kneels to their level at the center of the confusion. He’s speaking to them.

“—and that is why it is important to learn these skills when you’re young; they could become crucial to your future development and success. Now, many people believe that the styles of drapes are interchangeable. Not true. There are many distinct drapery styles, all of which come with their own merits and bring their own flair to a room. There is ripple fold drapery. Tailored pleat drapery. Pinch pleat drapery. Goblet drapery…”

This is around the point when Dani notices the sleepy, glazed-over look in many of the childrens’ eyes. It’s a familiar one; Dani, who’s sat through variations on this speech multiple times herself, knows it well. Another familiar sight is the one she catches a few seconds later: Sarah Connor, distinctly unimpressed and rolling her eyes from a couple feet away.

“Enough, already!” she finally cuts in. “You’re gonna bore these kids to death.”

Carl looks up at her blankly. “I am teaching them a valuable lesson that may be vital in their near futures,” he tells her.

She raises her eyebrows behind trademark sunglasses, then turns her attention to the kids.

“Oh, yeah? Be honest—how many of you are having fun?”

The children (harboring, as children will, blind loyalty to the man who is never too busy to indulge them and so often picks them up like they’re weightless) mumble their way through token affirmations, but the lackluster implications are clear; all of them love Carl. None of them love drapes. 

Sarah purses her lips and fixes her opponent with a knowing, “told-you-so” expression. His own face betrays nothing.

“Yeah, well,” Sarah bends down, bracing one hand on her leg to mingle with the squirts. She stage-whispers, “How would you guys like to have some  _ real _ fun?”

They gape at her, enraptured. Keeping a gravely conspiratorial look plastered over her features, Sarah jerks her thumb behind her at the parking lot, head inclined slyly toward the same. Her audience holds its collective breath as it turns, as one, to see.

On the receiving end of Sarah’s covert ministrations: a solitary dirt bike, blazing red and impossibly alluring. 

It’s her newest project. 

A recent trip to the dump rewarded Sarah with the bike; after a daring rescue from the garbage heap, the mechanical skills she’d had such ample opportunity of late to hone did the rest. For the past few weeks, Sarah has been channeling her flightier tendencies by throwing herself into bike maintenance whenever the urge for self-isolation hits—coming dangerously close to that mythical beast, the “healthy coping mechanism,” in the process—and is now smugly reaping the fruits of her labor. She shows her hand, and is hit with a wave of unprecedented adoration.

_ God, I’ve gone soft, _ Sarah thinks to herself with a smile as she saunters off toward the lot. She can live with it. There are worse things in the world.

Sarah doesn’t have to glance behind her to know she’s being followed; a few of the more careless children have already taken off in her wake, running for the dirt bike in rapturous excitement. The others hang back. They’re anchored by their loyalty to Carl and the fear that leaving amidst his curtain rhapsody may hurt his feelings, though longing sighs and unmasked puppy dog eyes comically betray their true calling. As he starts to rise himself, Carl finally notices the guilty looks they’re casting between him and the bike, silently seeking his blessing that they might join with the others, and he laughs.

“Go on,” he tells them. “Wear a helmet.”

And with that, they do. Mostly. There’s a general stampede of children, running and pushing as they jockey to reach the bike first. Only one boy sticks behind with Carl, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. Dani watches as he beckons Carl down to whisper in his ear—what she doesn’t hear, but Carl does, is the admission that he doesn’t want to get on the bike, as it scares him—and then squeals in delight as Carl swings him up to sit on his shoulders.

“That’s okay,” Carl says. “You don’t have to.”

The kid looks relieved, and Dani smiles. Carl  _ is _ good with children, whether it be due to his nature as an infiltrator or the years he spent being a father in his own right. She’s glad to have him here. When Carl gently lets the boy down, he bounces off to rejoin the others, apparently content to watch Sarah ride as long as it’s clear he’s under no commitment to join her.

Speaking of Sarah: the woman of the hour herself stands jauntily beside the bike, oozing badassery and captivating her audience with a story of how she used to ride one just like it. (Perhaps a stretch, given that she’s referring to the moped she rode to work back in 1984, but she allows herself the fiction.)

“So!” she concludes. “Who wants the first shot?”

And a hush falls over the crowd. The kids—buzzing with energy just seconds before—fall silent, looking at each other nervously while confronting the reality of actually  _ riding _ that deathtrap, which, up close, seems both bigger and more intimidating than they’d bargained for. Sarah says nothing, just watches, her eyebrows raised, daring any of them to take the bait. They don’t.

Dani and Grace exchange an amused smile. They came out to advertise their event, but the sight of these two dinosaurs interacting with children is so novel that they’ve reached an unspoken agreement to see how it plays out. Making their way over to join the little crowd, Dani takes Grace’s hand and has her own squeezed in response. She smiles. It feels so  _ good _ to be able to do something as simple as this, just standing here watching Sarah amaze and terrify the younger generation; that’s what Dani’s learned most from her life here. Every tiny, insignificant happiness you can impart on the world or yourself is a gift.

Finally, one little girl raises a timid hand, a lock of dark brown hair falling in her face as she does. Sarah beams, tossing her a helmet and showing her how to secure it, then lifting her up and putting her on the back of the bike before swinging her own leg over in front.

“Now, we’ll start off slow for you beginners. Hold on tight, okay?”

The little girl nods bravely, although she’s already buried her face in Sarah’s back so not to look as they get going. Sarah smiles to herself and kicks off, revving the engine dramatically... and then putters along in slow, underwhelming circles as the kid acclimates to the ride.

Watching from the sidelines, Dani feels a surge of warmth for Sarah and how far she’s come. Progress definitely hasn’t been simple for the woman. Even after reaching a final decision with regards to her stay at the complex, there are still times when she disappears for days on end—usually bringing Carl, but sometimes all on her lonesome—and yet, as weeks turn into months, these times have gotten less and less frequent. Sarah makes it to more breakfasts with the family that Dani has built, smiles at more of the residents, not because she feels obligated to, but because she’s starting to genuinely enjoy their company. Today seems like one of Sarah’s best days yet, and it warms Dani’s heart to see it. 

On the bike, the kid clutching Sarah so tight it’s a miracle she can breathe has begun to unfurl, alternating between tentative peeks and quick darts back to comfort when things become too much to handle. Soon enough, she must give Sarah some indication that she wants to speed up, because they’re off—Sarah accelerates with a laugh, and as she does so, Dani notices that she’s not the only one watching Sarah’s progress. Beside her, Carl is tracking Sarah with very careful eyes, acutely focused and just a little wide; for a terminator, he’s betraying more emotion than a human might while openly weeping.

Grace sees it too.

“Hey,” she says, nudging him. “Did you blow a fuse or something? What’s wrong with your face?”

Carl’s eyes don’t leave Sarah, who has her head thrown back and is laughing with the kid as they swerve through the desertscape on the outskirts of the housing. 

“She is stunning.”

Dawning realization lights in Grace’s eyes. “Holy shit,” she whispers, trying (but not very hard) to protect the children’s ears. “Have you actually developed  _ feelings? _ Are you, like, attracted to Sarah?”

Carl takes his eyes off the dirt bike and its riders for just long enough to glance at Grace, and then down to where her hand is joined with Dani’s.

“My software is not much different from yours. If you are capable of romantic feelings, I don’t see why I should not be.”

Dani darts a fleeting look up at Grace, concerned that the unsubtle reminder of what she has been made into might strike a chord and upset her, but Grace looks too deep in thought re: Carl’s apparent capabilities to care or even notice. Grace rounds on Dani.

“Did you know that?”

“Well, I mean, I guess,” Dani stutters, hesitant. “I thought you did too, when you asked about… you know.”

She bites her lip and flicks her eyes from Carl to Grace a few times with great urgency. As if Grace could have forgotten  _ that _ conversation. It takes everything in her power to not ask “screwing?” in a pseudo-innocent voice that she knows will get her slapped (not that she’ll even notice), but in the end, the response she lands on isn’t a lot better.

“Well, yeah, but I thought he was like, a sexbot. You know, doing whatever Sarah wanted.”

Actually, it may be worse.  _ Oops. _

Dani looks like she wants to sink into the ground and escape the conversation, which is probably not an unfair response. Carl glances from the children (all blissfully unaware of Grace’s uncouth comment, luckily for her) to Grace, raising an eyebrow.

“I find that very offensive.”

The statement does nothing to diminish the look perhaps best described as “morbid curiosity” on Grace’s features. She looks from him to Dani and back again.

“Seriously, is anyone going to tell me when a  _ terminator _ learned how to be a real boy?” 

This is not, in Grace’s opinion, an outrageous question to ask. She’s spent a majority of her adult life fighting terminators (more advanced models than this obsolete thing from a future that came undone, she might add) and has never seen so much as a  _ hint _ that they might be capable of feeling anything or even  _ knowing _ anything, outside of their orders. Being sent back in time to defend the present with her life, Grace had been prepared to die to stop just one piece of the unstoppable horde from taking Dani—beautiful, courageous, inspiring Dani Ramos—from her, because she knew as well as anyone that a terminator could not be reasoned with, could not evolve, would not stop, ever. Now she’s back from the dead, and she lives right next door to an old woman with a terminator for a house husband—how the fuck is she supposed to deal with that? “I mean, is that not a big deal for any of you?”

A presence that even Grace’s advanced sensors hadn’t registered claps her on the shoulder. At the first touch, some deep part of her composed entirely in ones and zeroes activates a defence mechanism that Grace has to manually disable a microsecond later before she blows the owner of that hand to chunks.

“It happened when you were dead, sweetheart. Try to catch up.”

Sarah. Grace had been so preoccupied with the question of  _ how the fuck _ that she somehow missed the old woman pulling her motorbike to a stop, dismounting, and helping the kid down on her feet. (Initially so timid, she now she tells the other kids how  _ cool _ her experience was and acts out with exaggerated movements the turns that they took toward the end, her eyes wide and disposition animated.) Now, Sarah watches the others start to bounce around with contagious excitement. She waggles her eyebrows at them.

“Who’s next?”

It’s a good day for Sarah. Not all days are, and this one is better than most, but having so much as a  _ receptacle _ for these positive feelings is a sign of improvement that not even she can ignore. Time was, Sarah would take one step toward something good and instinct would take her two steps back; hope and happiness were dangerous things, armed against her like a bomb. It isn’t like that anymore. She isn’t happy all the time, and she still feels that itch deep in her bones that tells her it’s time to pick up and run, but happiness, hope—these are things that Sarah is moving toward, now, and not away from. Her road isn’t the quickest, and it’s sure as hell no straight line, but she’s on the path and going the right way, and that’s more than she’s been able to say in a long, long time.

Dani and the others stand by while Sarah takes each volunteer riding around the premises, showing off with the braver children and being rewarded with a chorus of gleeful shrieks. After all the willing participants have taken their turns and worn themselves out (winning Sarah many points in their parents’ books that day), she pulls the bike to a grinding halt and turns the floor over to Dani and Grace, who do their best to entice the kids toward food, Disney, and air conditioning. It’s not exactly a hard sell. 

Catching a short second wind, the children scamper off to beg their parents’ permission, and just like that, Dani, Sarah, Grace, and Carl find themselves alone.

“The kids really like you,” Dani observes, her tone purposefully casual. She’s not entirely sure how Sarah will react to the statement, and doesn’t want to say anything that will hurt her—especially not today.

Sarah brushes it off. Could have seen that one coming.

“Oh, they only like me because the alternative is this guy,” she says, nodding her head to Carl, “and I don’t lecture them about drapes.”

“They love it when I talk about drapes,” Carl says. 

Dani grins. The four of them meander back toward the buildings in a companionable silence, breaking off into pairs when they reach their respective doors; Sarah and Carl disappear into Sarah’s room to do… whatever it is they do, and Dani and Grace duck into Dani’s, where, once upon a time, she had spent so many countless hours struggling with the endoskeleton that would be Grace.

She has to say, she much prefers the company of the finished product.

The silence that carried them over the grounds and through the parking lot reigns true as they wash off layers of dust and grime accumulated by dragging chairs around and with proximity to dirt bike, their movements familiar and in sync. For a moment, Dani debates whether or not her role as the orchestrator of this event necessitates that she change into something fancy, or at least niceish, but then she catches sight of Grace pulling on sweatpants and a men’s tank top (her pajamas of choice) and the decision is made for her—comfort over style.

It’s kind of a fitting way to celebrate everything they’ve done, Dani reflects. After all, even with the extensive work it took and is continuing to take, the life she’s built here has always been about learning how to be comfortable again.

Dani follows her girlfriend’s lead, stripping out of work clothes and digging in a drawer for a set of her own pajamas. She’s just pulled on a pair of fuzzy pants that make Grace cringe (to which Dani says, she’s still learning to enjoy good things after a life of hardship, and to which Grace responds, if all “good things” are made of disgusting textures and unicorn patterns, she’s going to find a way to travel back to the war) when her innocent attempt to clothe herself is thwarted by a cold hand wrapping around her waist and a familiar face burying itself in her hair.

Dani isn’t wearing a shirt, and is being made increasingly aware of that fact.

“Grace!” Dani says, not averse to the attention per se, but very cognizant of the time they  _ don’t _ have to get distracted. “The families are going to be getting there soon.”

Grace smiles against her. Dani is so familiar with that smile by now that she can feel it, and the knowledge—that she knows, that she is known—makes her warm.

“Sarah and Carl could set it up,” Grace suggests, voice low. “Just this once.” 

Dani hums, then turns so their bodies are flush. She drapes her arms over Grace’s shoulders and joins her hands behind her neck.

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Dani says, trailing one hand down the length of Grace’s throat. “What did you have in mind... instead?”

Dani drops her other hand down to Grace’s hip and runs it up underneath the tank top. Grace shivers. 

“Maybe something like this?” Dani asks. Grace is coming undone at record speed, nodding rapidly because she can’t form the words fast enough to agree.

“Or…” Dani guides Grace backward until her knees hit the bed, then pushes her down with strength that, by all rights, really  _ shouldn’t _ be able to move a robot with a 200+ pound endoskeleton, except for the fact that this one in particular is so enthusiastic about being moved. Grace falls back with a thump, and her eyes widen as Dani moves to join her. “...This?” 

One of Dani’s hands cups Grace’s jaw, and Grace looks like she’s just about to melt.

“Yeah,” she breathes. “Just like that.”

“Well,” Dani says, her voice still sultry right up to the moment when her demeanor changes entirely and she’s attacking Grace with rapid fire kisses all over her face and hopping backward toward her dresser while Grace is still dazed, “sorry!”

She pulls a t-shirt over her head and dashes for the door, giggling at Grace’s sudden and vehement protest. Pausing before she leaves, Dani calls, “Sarah would cancel the event if we left her in charge. I have to be there! But I love you! We can get back to this later, okay?” by way of apology, and then dashes off, still flushed and grinning from their Moment.

That smile accompanies Dani all the way to the double doors guarding her temporarily renovated cafeteria, and then it goes a little misty. She lingers for just a second longer than is necessary, taking it all in.

The room is filled pretty much to capacity. Every child from the complex is present and accounted for (and some others besides); their parents talk amicably over their enthusiastic progeny while they help one another pass out refreshments, both the ones that Dani and Grace had set out for this purpose earlier, and other dishes that they had taken it upon themselves to prepare. She sees store-bought sugar cookies passed out among the children along with homemade chex mix, bags of chips alongside much-advocated—by parents, at least—bottles of water. Señora Gutiérrez offers Dani a tamale when she passes, and the sight of the corn husk wrapping nearly makes her cry. How long has it been since she had a community like this? Has she ever?

All Dani can think as she calls for a hush and introduces the feature starting up on her projector is,  _ ‘I made this. These people wouldn’t be here together if it weren’t for me,’  _ and she knows that she has done good. At the back of the room, Dani catches sight of Sarah and Carl, already settled comfortably into one of the couches that Grace had carried in on one arm. Sarah lounges with her feet kicked up over the armrest, half-melted into Carl’s side; he doesn’t seem to mind it.

As Dani dims the lights to let the feature take her audience’s attention, she sees Grace come in through the back door, still pouting a little from the bait-and-switch Dani pulled in the bedroom but brightening up instantly when she catches sight of the screen and remembers how it felt to watch this movie all those years ago. They meet each other in the dark on a mutual trajectory toward their couch, and Dani goes up on her toes to give Grace a consultory kiss before settling down on Carl’s other side, her hand laced naturally with Grace’s. Sarah wordlessly passes Dani the tub of popcorn she had been inhaling at a superhuman rate, and Dani passes back one of the tamales she had accepted from Sra. Gutiérrez.

It’s almost perfect.

The opening number makes Dani momentarily rethink her decision to abide Grace’s choice, but, letting it progress, she finds herself appreciating the movie in a new light—and not in the least because of the way Grace’s eyes sparkle when she sees the princess, or the way she squeezes Dani’s hand without noticing when she laughs at a joke or reacts to a song. The children in the room, too, have an enjoyment of the film that makes it feel magical, and Dani wonders if that wasn’t the point all along. She settles between Carl and Grace and laughs at stupid jokes alongside a family, among people whom she has saved and who have saved her in turn, some of whom share her culture, some of whom share her experiences, and Dani finally, finally, feels  _ completely _ understood.

Ten minutes after the lights go down, Dani happens to glance over at Sarah and laughs at what she sees; never having feigned a modicum of interest in the feature to begin with, it hadn’t taken Sarah long at all to give up all pretense of paying attention in favor of passing the fuck out. The sunglasses perched on her nose do nothing to hide the fact that she’s fallen deeply unconscious, and may, in fact, be in danger of falling themselves.

“Looks like it wasn’t just the kids that Sarah wore out,” she whispers, nudging Grace. Grace snorts. On Dani’s other side, Carl gently rearranges Sarah’s position in an ultimately futile attempt to control the volume of her snores. It’s such a simple gesture, but Dani feels her heart sing, and wonders if the person she was—the people they all were—two years before could have conceived of the night they’re having now.

Maybe that’s a sign of progress, she thinks. Being able to enjoy an event you never thought you’d live to see.

Grace, certainly, had never banked on seeing this film again. The fact that she’s sitting here, rediscovering the joy of a dumb cartoon and not having to think about the next battle she’ll fight, the next attack she may not make it out of—all that would have been laughable before she was sent back, but here she is, a soldier without orders, marching unaided through a life she stopped believing in nearly 20 years ago. On paper, this new, blind progress might have been a terrifying prospect to someone as used to structure and orders and regiments as Grace had been, but there is excitement in the unknown, and at least one familiar element as security; Grace knows how to live in a community of Dani Ramos’ design. (This being, she thinks, the ultimate goal of Dani’s all along: a community built on supporting one another even without a common enemy, a commune established in peace.) Grace may be marching blind, but she is still marching next to the woman she loves the most in the world.

She wouldn’t trade that for any future.

The only member of their company perhaps less prepared for a time of peace than the scavenger child from the bad future who joined a freedom regiment at the age of 14 sits sprawled across a terminator on the other side of the couch, and her presence here today may be more incredible than time travel. This is Sarah Connor as Sarah Connor might have been in a timeline that doesn’t exist, one where nothing came back from the future to kill  _ or _ protect her, one where the future she was hurtling toward was remarkable only in its potential for a calmer life. She lays there, not unadorned by the scars of her past, but perhaps learning to heal from them, allowing them to mar her skin without at the same time marring her psyche. Sarah’s road to this point has been long, it is nonlinear and ongoing, but tonight, she sleeps soundly without the poisonous crutch of alcohol, and while the ghosts of the family she might have known—John, of course, but also Dani’s father and brother, whom Sarah never met but feels she has from all the stories she’s heard, and Kyle, and even that other damn terminator she melted back at the foundry—are not forgotten, she’s in no hurry to join them just yet.

And at the center of it all, there’s Carl. He has one arm rested in what he calculates to be a comforting fashion around Dani’s shoulders, and the other one (the one that’s been ripped off and refitted twice now) smoothes down Sarah’s hair with movements that are only imperceptibly jerky. Out of respect for Dani’s movie night, a fraction of his operating power is allocated to taking in information and signals from the projector, but only a fraction; the rest of him can’t help reflecting on the events that brought them here.

He was never meant to become what he is now. The code that makes up the groundwork for who Carl is had barely been able to accomodate the knowledge he would need to kill John Connor when he had first been tasked with it. Now, though, twenty-four years later, he has entered into a different life, and has learned (and continues learning) things far beyond the scope of what his programming will allow him. Even two years ago, Carl had understood his ability to fight fate, to be a protector when he had only been designed to destroy, but had told Dani that he could still never do some things, could never cross some lines. He told her he would never be able to love.

Carl is starting to wonder if he may have been wrong about that, too.

Because, if there’s one thing he’s learned since finding himself inexplicably revived when all he had ever been was an expendable machine in a world of machines with one purpose, it is that this unprogrammed desire to protect these people who have become his family—Sarah, Dani, and Grace, of course, and Alicia and Matteo, his first family, whom he still watches out for even when he knows he can’t go to them, can’t capriciously insert himself into and out of their lives—doesn’t come from nothing. Perhaps it isn’t love like a human might feel that drives him to hold Sarah when she sleeps, even though it’s been months since her last debilitating nightmare, or to help Dani when she’s working alone in her garden, maybe not love when he went out alone to attend Alicia’s graduation from her night school last month or when he sees Matteo going off to college and feels pride for the boy who is his son, but if there’s a better word, he hasn’t come across it yet, and doesn’t think anyone would fault him for appropriating the terminology.

Without any one of them really acknowledging it, there is a mutual realization unfurling between them, one built on understanding, new beginnings, recovery, love. Without trying to do anything but stop the end of the world, the four of them have accidentally built a home.

That may be their greatest achievement of all.

**Author's Note:**

> woof. if you've gotten this far, first of all, thank you. this has been an incredibly taxing labor of love for me, and i'm more excited to share it than i can say. 
> 
> second, let me acknowledge that the revolution here vis a vis dani's haven was, yes, completely simplistic. that was sort of the point. i didn't have the time or, honestly, the inclination to explore the kind of real-world actions that a grassroots movement even remotely similar to the one in my story would take, so i didn't. the beauty of fiction is that it's escapism; that being said, i hope the undertones of helping your fellow man ring true. if you were just here for the grace/dani content, well, thanks for sticking with it anyway, lmao.
> 
> the spanish dialogue in the conversation between sra. gutiérrez and dani was my own, and essentially translates to:  
> sra. gutiérrez: you're welcome.  
> dani: ma'am, are you alright? i can explain everything... more or less. do you need medical attention?  
> sg: don't worry, girl. is the fucker dead?  
> d: yeah, i think so.  
> sg: then i'm ok. this place gave us a home. i won't let assholes destroy it.  
> if any spanish speakers see flaws in the grammar, please let me know! it's my second language and i'd like to do it justice. thank you!
> 
> signing off, i'd like to dedicate this fic to my friend, who pointed out that grace would have been the perfect age to be a huge fan of frozen when she was a kid. thanks for that cursed take, and for everything. hope this was worth the wait <3


End file.
